The aim of this conference was to consider current thinking on behavior modification and social education, and to examine ways in which the psychological and educational concepts and skills involved in these approaches could best be taught to nurses. Over 40 nurse tutors, clinical teachers, and inservice training officers attended the conference.…

This selective bibliography of recent publications by Rand researchers in the Information Processing Systems research program includes only those papers concerned with the broad range of topics in cognitive science. These topics include the modeling of complex human behavior, the construction of intelligent computer systems, and the representation…

In this study of children's memory, two types of presentation modes (pictures or words) were crossed with two levels of memory strategy ("make a picture in your mind" or "think of the word") to comprise four treatments: see picture/think picture, see picture/think word, see word/think picture, see word/think word. The study was conducted with 144…

An experiment, which replicates an earlier study conducted in Sweden, was performed to study the effects of prior knowledge of relevant subject matter on reading comprehension and on memory. Fifty college students read one of two contrasting passages that presented two opposing points of view after they had recorded their beliefs about the subject…

Intended for graduate students in special education, the text presents seven author contributed papers dealing with theoretical issues in the field. M. Faust and W. Faust ("Cognitive Constructing: Levels of Processing and Developmental Change") consider cognitive processing from a developmental perspective. In "Memory Processes in Exceptional…

The skilled performance of conference interpreters has aroused some interest of late, both on the part of interpreters interested in studying their own complex skills, and of psychologists interested in cognitive behavior. Recent theories in this field have concentrated on information processing aspects of the task, and on the role of anticipatory…

This study examined the effect of the occurrence of homophones in instructional materials on the learning of new vocabulary. Forty-two junior high school seventh graders were randomly assigned to two groups of 21 each. Group one was exposed to a set of six slides that showed sentences using homophonic pairs of words (juxtaposed sentences) and then…

This experiment examined two processes which might account for developmental increases in accuracy in visual recognition tasks: age-related increases in efficiency of scanning during inspection, and age-related increases in the ability to make decisions systematically during test. Critical details necessary for recognition were highlighted as…

Averaged evoked potential (AEP) is an event-related brain response obtained by averaging the scalp electrical potentials elicited by repeated presentations of the same event. It has proven to be an accurate measure of the activity of the mature human brain when involved in a wide variety of psychological tasks. Distinct psychological processes…

This report focuses on the development of general problem-solving skills which are subsumed under the general heading of metacognition: in particular, the skills of predicting, checking, monitoring, reality testing, and coordinating and controlling deliberate attempts to learn or solve problems. The report is organized in five sections: an…

A study was conducted to provide an assessment of the general efficiency of working memory in relation to level of field articulation. The task required a subject to retain a series of digits for subsequent report while performing a semantic modification of a target phrase. The working memory hypothesis predicts that the joint impact of high…

Thirty-two parent couples participated in this investigation to determine whether learning patterns established in the home environment significantly affect a child's later cognitive development in traditionally school-taught subjects. This research report outlines the methodology used in the study, explains the operational criteria for the four…

The theoretical framework for investigating human planning behavior and the procedures, results, and implications of two experiments involving planning in the domain of software design are presented in this report. A plan is defined as a hierarchical structure that underlies the solution to a problem; planning is the process of constructing this…

The final report describes a project to devise and field test methods of assessing short-term memory in deaf blind children. It is explained that four tests of short-term memory were devised (Body Touch - Sighted Version, Body Touch - Blind or Blindfolded Version, Removed Object Test, and Finger Touch Test) and field tested with 32 children (8-15…

A set of studies investigated the relative importance of operative schemes and figurative (rote) memory. In Study I, 60 concrete operational children from grades 1-4 were asked to reconstruct two types of stimuli from memory. In order to separate the effects of operative and figurative skill use, learning disabled children with poor figurative…