Implicit understanding of false belief was investigated by monitoring where preschoolers looked in anticipation of a protagonist reappearing, when the protagonist mistakenly thinks that his desired object is in a different place from where it really is. Two-year olds erroneously looked at the object's real location whereas most older children…

Five experiments examined three-year olds' ability to complete a false belief task that was manipulated in terms of their grasp of the narrative base. Children who failed a traditional task succeeded if they narrated the book version back to the experimenter. The results suggest that the structure of three-year olds' event memories is central to…

Toddlers were asked to find a hidden toy based on one hidden in a scale model of the room, after varying periods of delay. Subjects experiencing a longer delay on the first trial performed more poorly than those experiencing the long delay later in the trials. Results indicate the difficulty for children of keeping a symbol-referent relation in…

Current schooling must change based on new scientific evidence concerning the way human beings learn. To chase fads without addressing teachers' instructional behaviors or the antiquated organizational structures characterizing most schools is frivolous. There is a broad gap between performance and learning and an even broader gap between…

Investigates comprehension problems of children whose decoding skills are normal but whose reading comprehension skills are poor. Concludes that working memory processes are not a major causal factor in the creation of the comprehension difficulties identified in these poor comprehenders. (RS)

Compared 24 month olds' ordered recall of events constrained by enabling relations with that of arbitrarily ordered events equated for familiarity and temporal invariance. Children's ordered recall of events constrained by enabling relations was superior to that of arbitrarily ordered ones, indicating that, after experience with an event in…

This study found that 331 Toronto (Ontario, Canada) adolescent and adult subjects with learning disabilities could be grouped into three subtypes: (1) arithmetic disability, (2) reading disability, and (3) reading and arithmetic disabilities. Each group differed significantly from the others on tests of reading, spelling, memory, and other…

Using the Recognition Memory Test, Digit Span subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised, and the Knox Cube Test as markers for malingered memory deficits was studied with 100 university students, federal inmates, and patients with head injuries. Malingerers performed more poorly than injured patients on all three tests. (SLD)

Two experiments involving 65 college students support the hypothesis that, when students read about a familiar topic, they use a reinstatement-and-integration strategy in which familiar knowledge is retrieved from long-term memory along with some information about the original context in which facts were learned. (SLD)

Investigates whether audio/video redundancy improves memory for television messages. Suggests a theoretical framework for classifying previous work and reinterpreting the results. Suggests general support for the notion that redundancy levels affect the capacity requirements of the message, which impact differentially on audio or visual…

Individual differences in procedural and declarative learning of a sequence-learning task by 455 adolescents were measured and compared to one another and to scores on a performance battery. A framework is proposed to explain the results based on a combination of approaches to explain dissociations found in memory. (SLD)

The memory abilities of adults (N=20) with Down Syndrome (DS) were compared to subjects matched on age and IQ and on age alone. Three memory tasks were employed: facial recognition, free recall of pictures and words, and cued recall of separate or interacting pictures. In DS individuals, memory was improved primarily by practice and interactive…

Discusses connectionist techniques that can be used for modeling perception, memory, and language processing, concentrating on a class of network with dual-weight connections in which each connection has both short- and long-term weight and describes a novel architecture in which the short- and long-term weights are independent. (45 references)…

Examined the long-term retention of 216 preschoolers, half of whom received a single slide presentation and while the other half received consecutive presentations until they learned the material to criterion. Exposure to misleading information 3 weeks after the presentation encouraged the preschoolers to report misinformation 4 weeks after the…

The genetic and environmental causes of the phenotypic association between reading and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) were analyzed using data from the Colorado Reading Project for 446 twin pairs. Results of bivariate behavioral genetic analyses indicate that both reading ability and VSTM are highly heritable. (SLD)