Presenting inconsistent postevent information about a witnessed incident typically decreases the accuracy of memory reports concerning that event (the "misinformation effect"). Surprisingly, the "reversibility" of the effect (after an initial occurrence) has remained largely unexplored. Based on a "memory conversion" theoretical framework and…

Pedagogical considerations should be guided by empirical, brain-based research on the human information processing system. People build and organize knowledge into a network-like system that connects related information. As learning occurs, learners expand the network to accommodate new information. Instructional strategies can be used to maximize…

Current debate in mental imagery research revolves around the perceptual and cognitive role of eye movements to "nothing" (Ferreira, Apel, & Henderson, 2008; Richardson, Altmann, Spivey, & Hoover, 2009). While it is established that eye movements are comparable when inspecting a scene (or hearing a scene description) as when…

Research on the strategic regulation of memory accuracy has focused primarily on monitoring and control processes used to edit out incorrect information after it is retrieved (back-end control). Recent studies, however, suggest that rememberers also enhance accuracy by preventing the retrieval of incorrect information in the first place (front-end…

Objective: To study the effects of green tea extract administration on age-related cognition in young and old male Wistar rats. Methods: Young and old rats were orally administered 0.5% green tea extract for a period of eight weeks and were evaluated by passive avoidance, elevated maze plus paradigm and changes in acetylcholinesterase activity.…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the possibility of faster forgetting by PDAPP mice (a well-established model of Alzheimer's disease as reported by Games and colleagues in an earlier paper). Experiment 1, using mice aged 13-16 mo, confirmed the presence of a deficit in a spatial reference memory task in the water maze by hemizygous…

Five-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and adults were compared in a successive tachistoscopic recognition task in which size of the first array and the interval between the first array and the second single recognition-test stimulus were varied. (Author/SB)

Reviews Piaget's theories concerning the development of operational thought which includes as a prerequisite the differentiation of oneself from all other phenomena, and presents an experiment in which first and second graders conserved the mass, weight, and volume of a ball of clay before they conserved their own mass, weight, and volume. (MB)

Explores the nature and consequences of developmental change in speed of information processing. Summarizes evidence indicating that age differences in processing speed reflect a global mechanism that limits processing speed on most tasks. Describes evidence that suggests a role for processing speed on the development of intelligence. (Author/MKA)

The effects of memory load (simultaneous or successive presentation), number of trials (two or three), and type of information (positive, negative, or mixed) upon inference task performance of 168 five-year-old children were examined. (Author/JH)

A key proposition of attachment theory is that experience-based cognitive representations of attachment, often referred to as internal working models of attachment, influence the manner in which individuals process attachment-relevant social information (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973, 1980; Bretherton & Munholland, 1999; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985).…

This study assessed the recognition by conserving and nonconserving first graders, of true and false permise and inference sentences following story presentations. Conservers performed slightly better than nonconservers on sentences other than true inference sentences, thus indicating that concrete mental operations are related to the process of…

First and fifth graders' incidental free and cued recall were tested after an orienting task in which semantic and acoustic encoding were constrained for different words by requiring the children to answer questions about either the words' meanings or sounds. (Author/JMB)