Two experiments were carried out to see what parts of a sentence are best retained, whether those parts retained best immediately after acquisition are also remembered best after a 48 hour retention interval, and whether or not the parts of a sentence which are retained depend on the semantic and syntactic structure of that sentence. In the first…

The two studies reported here examined processes involved in learning and remembering sentences. Experiment one identified processes in sentence acquisition, and experiment two analyzed memory for sentences one week after initial learning. Subjects for the experiments were students in a college educational psychology class. The experiments…

The purpose of this research was to assess the validity of recent claims that experimenter-provided pictures facilitate young children's oral prose learning. The major question of interest was whether the pictures do nothing more than prompt the child to process the just presented information one more time, Three experiments were designed to test…

This research examines the effects of structure and content variables on memory and comprehension of prose passages. A process model for the comprehension of stories is proposed which assumes that stories are encoded in a hierarchical organizational framework which represents the abstract structural relationships of the plot. The implications of…

The mnemonic consequences of semantic, acoustic, and orthographic encoding and the relationships between encoding and retrieval cues were investigated in an incidental-learning experiment involving 24 first-, third-, and fifth-grade pupils. Each child was asked one orienting question for each of 18 words; the questions differed in the type of…

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical tradition which may broaden the scope and perhaps suggest alternate avenues of investigation of the function which we call "memory." As psychology developed during the past century, the area of memory has been strongly influenced on the theoretical level by the thinking of the British…

The organizational factors in memory relevant to learning medical diagnosis terms are discussed in this paper. Two hypotheses are tested: that the type of list organization will affect total recall; and that the type of curriculum and year in school will affect the organization of recall. Ninety-six second and third year medical students from two…

The purposes of this study were to determine the nature of human semantic memory and to obtain knowledge usable in the future development of computer systems that can converse with people. The work was based on a computer model which is designed to comprehend English text, relating the text to information stored in a semantic data base that is…

Forty reflective and 40 impulsive children were assigned to one of four treatment conditions. The learning task employed a list of 25 familiar objects, five instances from each of five categories. The four treatments were Randomized-No Instructions, Randomized-Instructed, Blocked-No Instructions, and Blocked-Instructed. Results support earlier…

The purpose of this experiment was to analyze developmental differences in rehearsal strategies which may mediate the commonly found age effect on free recall. As expected, significant age differences in recall were found; analysis of rehearsal strategies showed that fifth and eighth graders tended to repeat stimulus words immediately after…

The hypothesis that memory support (MS) reduces state anxiety (A-State) and errors in a computer assisted learning task was investigated. It was predicted that high A-State students given MS would make fewer errors than high A-State students given no memory support (NMS). Low A-State students were expected to perform equally as well with or…

This study is the fourth in a series of studies that have attempted to examine the relationship between two separate aptitude factors--associative memory and reasoning--to various performance criteria in a hierarchical learning task utilizing computer-assisted instruction. Two clear effects seem to emerge from the data. During learning, the…

Two groups of children took part in this longitudinal study of eidetic imagery (EI). The New Haven sample consisted of 12 elementary school children, and the Rochester sample consisted of 23 children (aged 7 to 11 years at the beginning of the study). The study was designed to find out some of the qualities of EI and its relationship to memory. An…

This investigation explored those characteristics of training variables that might be incorporated into the design of computerized training devices and systems for, or in, computer controlled training (CCT). Memory aids, computer controlled graphics, electronics circuit analysis, and CCT training schedules were studied. Findings included the…

Reported is another study related to the Project on an Information Memory Model. The purpose of this study was to establish the possible relationships of personality characteristics with the processing of information by humans in an abstract problem solving task. Thirty senior high school students, each of whom had completed the Edwards Personal…