Studies of the effects of imagery instructions and other imagery induction on prose learning are included in this progress report. Five experiments were conducted to establish a developmental trend for ability to use imagery-related mediation in whole passage learning. Observations indicate that six year olds are inhibited in paraphrase recall of…

The transformation of episodic inputs to semantic representations was studied in two very similar tasks. In one, subjects were required to infer the underlying four-term linear ordering from three comparative sentences such as, "The teacher is taller than the doctor." In the second task, subjects inferred underlying 4- and 5-digit…

Experiments are described in which students listened to messages describing the placements of numbers in imaginable matrices. Recall was tested by having students write in the correct cells of a blank matrix. Results appear consistent with a modified level of processing approach. (Author/RM)

Investigates the developmental differences in spatial exploration and memory, depending on the purposes for which children six- to seven- and eight- to nine-years-old explored the space. The results suggest that children's knowledge of large-scale space is tailored to the purpose of acquiring such information. (Author/BB)

This study presents a systematic investigation of three factors which seem necessary to initial success in obtaining recall facilitation when list member cues are presented during free recall. (Author/KM)

Performance of mildly mentally retarded and nonretarded persons was compared in two experiments designed to identify processes of auditory sensory memory. A theoretical model was proposed to incorporate the current pattern of results. (Author)

Two experiments investigated extent to which English- and German-speaking childrens' mental arithmetic was constrained by working memory. Found higher mental addition spans when numbers were visible throughout calculation than when not. Variation in addition span with age and arithmetical operation difficulty approximated to a linear function of…

This study used event-related potentials (ERP) and visual preference technique to assess 6-month olds' ability to recognize their mothers' face. Results of five experiments suggested that infants can recognize their mothers' face, but the neural processes accompanying recognition depend on the difficulty with which mothers can be discriminated…

Investigated the specificity of reading-disabled children's deficits in working memory capacity. Found that reading-disabled 10-year-olds performed worse than normal-reading children, matched for chronological age and reading age, on all measures of working memory capacity. Their poorer performance seemed to be due to a general lack of capacity…

Tobacco use is a major health problem that is estimated to cause 4 million deaths a year worldwide. Nicotine is the main addictive component of tobacco. It acts as an agonist to activate and desensitize nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). A component of nicotine's addictive power is attributable to actions on the mesolimbic dopaminergic…

The group of papers on memory reactivation and consolidation during sleep included in this volume represents cutting edge work in both animals and humans. They support that the two types of sleep serve different necessary functions. The role of slow wave sleep (SWS) is reactivation of the hippocampal-neocortical circuits activated during a waking…

Effective teaching is the art of getting information to the students' memory in an organized manner to facilitate later retrieval. Thanks to advances in cognitive science, one can talk of the science of teaching. A metaphor that captures the work of effective teachers is "teachers as knowledge engineers," which connotes that effective teachers…

In this article, the author presents an innovative approach to teaching multiplication facts for children in middle school or younger. After introducing the dangers of some contradictions that persist, relating a brief summary of related research and guidelines regarding math facts and their relation to strategic approaches to more complex math,…

Argues that most teachers do not understand the nature of human memory. Presents an informal introduction to human memory, including information on long-term retention, prior knowledge, retrieval, and cues. States that instructors can design memory-compatible instruction that makes recording and retrieval of new knowledge easier. (TW)