A group of 144 kindergarten and third grade students heard stories in which the information necessary to infer the protagonist's motives was varied as to its form and location in a story sequence. In all story variations, the semantic content of the information was held constant. All children completed three tasks: a moral judgment concerning the…

A "release from proactive inhibition (PI) task" method examines the masculine-feminine connotation of a word as an attribute of encoding in memory. Male (N=45) and female (N=61) subjects were given four trials, each trial consisting of three occupations with all masculine or all feminine connotations, a subtraction task, and a recall…

Reported are results of a study concerning the role of structural properties of scientific prose. Two major types of relations are identified as typically part of the scientific prose: description of relations, and explanation of mechanisms. Results of two experiments isolate one characteristic of scientific prose (explanation of mechanisms) as…

Much research in the area of person perception has dealt with the problem of how people organize information about other people, including how familiarity mediates the cognitive organization of person information. One multi-operational investigation found that information sets about familiar people, as opposed to unfamiliar people, resulted in the…

The current status of conceptions of learning in children is reviewed and some areas of neglect are considered in this paper. The main premise is that although considerable strides have been made in the understanding of the learning process, essential developmental formulations of growth and change have been poorly articulated. It is suggested…

This study investigates (1) the relationship of two potentially valuable measures of sequential processing to each other and to a measure of digit span, and (2) the relationships among tests of sequential processing and other measures of cognitive functioning. Subjects were 188 first grade students who had been screened in kindergarten for risk of…

While reading has been recognized as a potentially useful and enjoyable pastime for the elderly, physical and psychological decrements affect the ability of the elderly to read. As the eyes age, near-point tasks become more difficult. In addition to reduced sensory intake, perceptual changes occur. The central nervous system slows, and data travel…

This issue on suggestive learning contains the following articles: (1) "A Time of Growth," by Kay U. Herr; (2) "Sophrology and Suggestology/Suggestopedia: The Same System with a Different Name?" by W. Jane Bancroft; (3) SALT-Quo Vades or Caveat Emptor," by O. L. Caskey; (4) "A Comparison of Suggestopaedia and…

Forty first-grade children and 40 fourth-grade children participated in a study that sought to determine if age-related increases in memory for prose are due, in part, to deliberate mnemonic strategies and if older children use the higher-order relations in prose more efficiently than do younger children. Each child listened to a tape-recorded…

These experiments tested the hypothesis that an instructional strategy involving guided discovery will promote meaningful learning of problem solving concepts by activating an assimilative set during learning. In order to investigate the effect of discovery training and concrete manipulation, preschool children were given training in one to one…

Three-month-old infants learned to activate a crib mobile by means of operant footkicks. Retention of the conditioned response was assessed in the presence of the nonmoving mobile. Although forgetting is typically complete after an 8-day retention interval, infants who received a reactivation treatment, a brief exposure to the reinforcer 24 hours…

The measurability of sensorimotor development in 60 severely retarded, institutionalized adults was studied, using the Piagetian concept of object permanence in a delayed recall paradigm that involved special apparatus. Results suggested, among other things, that severely retarded, institutionalized adults learn most efficiently when trained with…

THREE STUDIES INVESTIGATE AUDITORY AND VISUAL MEMORY ABILITIES AND THEIR POTENTIAL ROLES AS INSTRUCTIONAL AND PERSONNEL PREDICTORS. STUDY I PRESENTS TO 185 COLLEGE FRESHMEN 42 ABILITY TESTS FROM WHICH SEVEN MAJOR ROTATED FACTORS EMERGE--SERIAL MEMORY SPAN, SERIAL INTEGRATION, ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY, ABSTRACTS FROM SOCIAL INTERACTION SITUATIONS, VERBAL…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of age differences and differences in memory load on concept identification (CI) tasks of varying levels of complexity. Previous studies with young children found increasingly better performance on CI tasks with increasing age. This was in part due to the fact that older subjects categorize…

The authors surveyed experts in the field of neuro-behavioral research to determine the directions of progress being made in increasing understanding of neural processing and storage of information. Based on this investigation, their report presents examples of research being pursued in this area. The authors see neuro-behavioral research leading…