This research project investigated some of the characteristics of primary and secondary memory. In the primary research, subjects were given a list of words followed by an interpolated task. The data of interest were the recall for terminal items in the list. Using this procedure, the researchers have demonstrated negative recency in initial…

This paper, presented at the 1973 meeting of the American Education Research Association, discusses some of the studies conducted in the area of learning from prose. The first study dealt with pooling independent sentences into groups of related sentences and preparing passages by stringing these sentences together. College students then read one…

The primary object of this research proposal is to delineate the area of general learning abilities. It differentiates between abilities and skills by defining ability as a general trait which can be inferred from observation of responses consistent across tasks and skill as a proficiency on a specific task or on a limited group of tasks. A review…

A battery of behavioral tests yielding 79 measures, many of which were presumably related to learning and memory, was administered to house mice of seven inbred strains. An analysis of the factorial structure indicated that the two principal and most pervasive factors underlying performance on the battery involved the initiation and maintenance of…

The study paired-associate (PA) learning via the anticipation (ANT) and study-test (ST) procedures across second, third, fourth and fifth grades. Specifically, age differences in the rate of learning and examining PA learning according to the stage analyses were examined. Retention was also of interest: however, a ceiling effect negated the…

The history of basic research in the area of memory development is briefly reviewed as part of an attempt to illustrate how basic research can inform educational practice. The historical overview is supplemented by more detailed consideration of a few prototypical research studies. This is followed by a description of the progress, problems, and…

The effect of variations in the organization of information and in contextual features upon comprehension of prose was tested using four tasks. Organization was varied to contrast hierarchical information structures and list information structures, and to test the effect of linking the structural components of the passage into a conceptual…

In two experiments, subjects verified 15 bird and 15 tool names on a list coming under either the category bird/tool (second hierarchical level [L2] of verification) or the category animate/inanimate (fourth hierarchical level [L4] verification). Subjects recalled fewer words following the L4 than the L2 verification. (Author/RM)

Two experiments are reported to investigate the theory that since auditory sensory memory is used to store memory information, concurrent auditory stimulation should destroy memory information and thus reduce recall performance. (Author/RM)

Three experiments are reported investigating the relationship between response recall and the spacing of repetitions as a function of the retention interval. The results of the experiments support the theory which emphasizes the nature of the cues available for retrieval. (Author/RM)

The use of directive cues to facilitate recall and clustering of verbal materials in good and poor readers is investigated. Overall results indicate strong and positive effects of directive cues on the subjects' recall and organization of memory, and indicate that poor readers are unadaptive learners who appear to have a performance deficit,…

This examination of retrieval interference in memory theories argues that relevant world knowledge can reduce interference by integrating factors learned about a concept. Three recognition experiments were conducted and two hypotheses were considered to account for the results: human associative memory and script analysis. (Author/RD)

Subjects listened to a story containing sentences with five quantifiers (all, many, some, a few, and none) and were tested to determine recognition of quantifiers. The degree of confusion between any two quantifiers declined monotonically with the separation of the two terms in a linear order. (SW)

To test the hypothesis that item-selection artifacts may distort data from the overt-rehearsal procedure in single-trial free recall, a controlled procedure was used where to-be-rehearsed items were presented to the subject rather than selected by him. No differences were found between the two procedures. (SW)