The generation of dynamic mental imagery is known to facilitate paired associate (PA) learning in older subjects. Wolff and Levin (in press) have reported that children who were apparently too young to generate mental imagery of this kind did benefit from self-generated motoric interactions involving pairs of toys. Since the result was obtained…

A skilled cognitive theorist might help behaviorists resolve inconsistencies found from their experimentation with imaginal mnemonics in paired-associate and serial learning tasks. Iconic cognition which relegates verbal processes to short-term storage and output systems is inadequate to explain the verbal coding and elaboration processes…

The effect of presentation time on learning under varying mediation instructions demonstrated a time-dependent difference in the facilitating effect of imagery generation or sentence generation instructions. Subjects were junior high school students working in a paired associate task with concrete nouns. Both cognitive strategies were more…

Two methodological issues involved in determining the relationship between learning and general intelligence were examined: (1) the use of learning strategies in a paired-associate task and (2) the importance of time (rather than errors) in the measurement of learning efficiency. (Author/RD)

This study investigated developmental differences in the use of the common features abstraction strategy and the exemplar learning strategy for concept acquisition. Subjects were 30 second graders and 30 fifth graders. The concepts to be learned were two categories of artificial animals which differed on five dimensions. Each dimension had three…

This study was the first in a series of investigations designed to examine techniques purporting to enhance the effectiveness of human memory. The utility of a simple pegword mnemonic for Army enlisted personnel, representing three levels of general technical ability, was examined. Half of each ability group was instructed in use of a rhyme…

This study is an attempt to investigate the usefulness of imagery instructions in learning PA nouns embedded in sentences and conjunction phrases with three different age groups (third grade, sixth grade and college students). In addition, six different item types are employed to convey increasingly dissimilar contexts from study to test trials.…

This study investigates the role of labeling in developmental increases in picture recall. In two experiments, the memory for pictorial paired-associates of first graders or second graders, fourth graders and adults was evaluated by means of a study-test cued recall procedure. In Experiment 1, the stimulus presentation duration (on-time) and the…

A study-recall paired-associates (PA) learning task was administered to 40 trainable mentally retarded children (6-14 years old) under one of four instructional modeling conditions: imagery, verbal mediation, imagery and verbal mediation, or control. On half of the PA learning study trials, the children were provided with modeled mediating…

Eighty sixth-grade subjects, split into five independent groups, learned two PA lists of 12 noun pairs each. Two groups performed under traditional transfer conditions with lists conforming to a negative transfer paradigm, A-B, A-C, or to a reference paradigm A-B, C-D. Two other groups learned the same lists under a syntactic PA method where the…

This study assessed the effects of bizarreness, prompt modality, and prompt type for 144 five and eight year-old children on recognition memory of pictorial pairs. Presentation of stimuli was self-paced, allowing for the collection of study time and response latency data, as well as recording number correct. While both bizarre and nonbizarre forms…

Clarification of one aspect of Jensen's model of cognitive abilities provided the impetus for this study. Jensen found that sentence construction as a mediator facilitated learning of paired associates, except when kindergarteners were used as subjects. The purpose of the present study is to determine whether the failure of the mediators to…

The major emphasis of this study is on the comparative validities of paired-associate learning tests and IQ tests in predicting reading achievement. The study engages in a brief review of earlier research in order to examine the validity of two assumptions--that the construction and/or the use of a tactic that simplifies a learning task is one of…

Two aspects of allocation of study time were examined among 48 third- and 48 fifth-grade children. Aspects examined were: (1) allocation of more time to more difficult material; and (2) allocation of sufficient time to meet a recall goal. Under a self-terminated procedure, children studied two booklets, one of which consisted of easy or highly…