Through randomness we create structure, and through structure we accommodate randomness. The structures we create have basic premises shared by all life forms and forces. These patterns are repeated and shared. Creative thinking has similar characteristics. (MSE)

Forward blocking is one of the best-documented phenomena in Pavlovian animal conditioning. According to contemporary associative learning theories, forward blocking arises directly from the hardwired basic learning rules that govern the acquisition or expression of associations. Contrary to this view, here the authors demonstrate that blocking in…

This study, supported by the National Science Foundation, "shows that the nursery school child remembers a set of pictures or objects better if the items are unitized, rather than arranged in a series. (Author)

Recent data suggest recovery of language systems but persistent structural abnormalities in the prematurely born. We tested the hypothesis that subjects who were born prematurely develop alternative networks for processing language. Subjects who were born prematurely (n = 22; 600-1250 g birth weight), without neonatal brain injury on neonatal…

The present experiments examined the extent to which two possible sources of error affect healthy subjects' performance in a rule-shift task. All 115 participants first received a discrimination learning task, in which a pair of different visual stimuli was presented on each trial, one of which had to be identified as "correct." Each stimulus…

The focus of this report was the degree of independence of memory attributes in determining performance. A demonstration experiment indicated that memory can carry an associative attribute and a frequency attribute simultaneously with little interaction between the two, that is, they were independent in their influence on performance. The…

Several theories of event-based prospective memory were evaluated in 3 experiments. The results depended on the association between the target event and the intended action. For associated target-action pairs (a) preexposure of nontargets did not reduce prospective memory, (b) divided attention did not reduce prospective memory, (c) prospective…

Despite earlier evidence that the presence of 2 redundant cues can facilitate activation of a common response, T. C. Rickard and D. Bajic (2004) found no dual-cue facilitation in the case of cued recall, provided that each cue-response association was learned independently. In this study the authors investigated the generality of their results…

This paper evaluates associative theories of sentence memory, based on the model of J.R. Anderson and G.H. Bower. A model of Human Associative Memory (HAM) is generalized and defined, and alternative models incorporating configural information are presented. (CK)

Picture-grouping and word-association tasks were used to evaluate the hypothesis that paradigmatic (same form class) word associates are not always categorical and may be a function of the child's understanding of interactive and categorical relations. (SB)

Priming effects of ignored distractor words were investigated in a task-switching situation that allowed an orthogonal variation of priming and response compatibility between prime and probe. Across 3 experiments, the authors obtained a disordinal interaction of priming and response relation. Responding was delayed in the ignored repetition…

False recognition, broadly defined as a claim to remember something that was not encountered previously, can arise for multiple reasons. For instance, a distinction can be made between conceptual false recognition (i.e., false alarms resulting from semantic or associative similarities between studied and tested items) and perceptual false…

Examines the usefulness of paired associative performance to assess for school learning proficiency by comparing a sample of learning-disabled (LD) youngsters to normals. Results indicate that the proportion of subjects in the normal and the LD groups who reported use of elaborative strategies compared to none laborative strategies does not differ…