Based on the assumption that the more teachers know about brain science, the better prepared they will be to make instructional decisions, this book presents information on current research regarding learning and memory, and applies the research to situations that educators face daily. Chapter 1 examines the structure of the brain and its…

Recently, confirmatory factor analysis has been extended to the case of dichotomous data (e.g., Muthen, 1978). In this study, confirmatory factor analysis was applied to all-or-none recall data from a designed experiment. In the experiment, subjects read pairs of English nouns and then tried to recall the right hand member of the pair when…

Level of state test anxiety and depression were related to encoding strategy (imagery versus sematic instructions) in a study of sentence memory. Subjects were 80 female undergraduate students. Negative effects for test anxiety were found in both strategy conditions. Negative effects were found for depression when the semantic encoding strategy…

This study examined the role of visual and auditory presentation in memory encoding processes of 80 second-grade children, using the release-from-proactive-interference short-term memory (STM) paradigm. Words were presented over three trials within one of the presentation modes and one taxonomic category, followed by a fourth trial in which the…

The phenomenon of more interference with reading than with listening was replicated using speech-related and nonspeech-related distractor tasks. It is argued that the selective interference effect is due to the relative difficulty of reading over listening rather than to the importance of speech recoding in reading. (Author/RD)

Summarizes findings on the relationship of working memory and long-term memory to language impairments. Language interventions are discussed, including promoting attention, speaking clearly and slowly, promoting phonological coding, planning activities around topics familiar to the learners, helping learners organize new knowledge, and providing…

Examined children's ability to accurately monitor sources of suggested information. Age differences were found in the degree to which a misleading suggestion led subjects to believe they actually remembered seeing events that had in fact only been suggested to them. Proposes that these age differences reflect developmental differences in the…

Internal source monitoring and internal-external reality monitoring of actions were compared in kindergartners and fourth graders. Children were asked to recall actions and identify their origins. Suggests the kindergartners' decrement in source monitoring is specific to discriminating memories from highly similar sources such as between actual…

Examined whether interviewer status or a preconceived bias affects children's memory and suggestibility or adults' descriptions of children's reports. Analyses revealed children's free recall accuracy suffered when they were interviewed by biased versus unbiased strangers but not when interviewed by biased versus unbiased mothers. Exposure to the…

Discussed theories relating forgetting rates and age. Developed a theory and mathematical model for examining storage failure versus retrieval failure, true forgetting versus test-induced processes, and storage- versus retrieval-based reminiscence. A series of experiments studied these factors in children and seniors. (BC)

Examined persistence of sensory memory by studying developmental differences in recall of attended and ignored lists of digits for second-graders, fifth-graders, and adults. Found developmental increase in the persistence of memory only for the final item in an ignored list, which is the item for which sensory memory is thought to be the most…

Three experiments with preschoolers tested the independence of the current state buffer from working memory. Findings indicated that when a teddy bear was an object put away with other toys, only half the preschoolers remembered its location despite explicit instructions. When the teddy was a character interacting with children, all remembered its…

Two experiments examined memory of 7-month-olds after 2-week retention interval for passages of two Mozart movements heard daily for 2 weeks. Results suggested that the infants retained familiarized music in long-term memory and that their listening preferences were affected by the extent to which familiar passages were removed from the musical…

Studied relations among children's short-term memory, working memory, inhibitory control, and arithmetic word-problem solving. Found that poor problem solvers had lower scores and made more intrusion errors in working memory tasks requiring inhibition of irrelevant information than good problem solvers. Findings indicated that performance relates…

This study explored the structure of verbal and visuospatial short-term and working memory in children between ages 4 and 11 years. Multiple tasks measuring 4 different memory components were used to capture the cognitive processes underlying working memory. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the processing component of working memory…