An increase in the amount of material to be learned increases the difficulty of the learning task. The function describing this length difficulty relation was obtained by measuring the amount of time 20 college students spent studying arrays of four, six, eight, and ten consonants before they were ready to be tested on them. Identification and…

Studies (2) of auditory memory performance are reported. Children were asked to recall material which permitted different language habits to be used (structural, and meaningful). Lower socio-economic status (LSES) Negro children performed more like their middle socio-economic status white (MSES) counterparts on non-contingent strings. When…

This study tested the hypothesis that the memory of meaningful material can be reactivated without relearning by means of hypnotic suggestion. Very susceptible (T) and non-susceptible (UT) subjects were sought from among those who volunteered for the experiment. Two forms of a memory test for connected meaningful material were developed. Each form…

The effects of imagery on the recognition of subunits within a textual passage were investigated. College students first rated the subunits of a textual passage with respect to imagery. A different group of subjects was then given the passage to read, and these subjects were subsequently tested for recognition, either immediately or one week…

Subjects in an independent groups free learning experiment recalled list of low- or high-arousal words, matched for imagery and frequency and exposed randomly for 3 seconds and 9 seconds. Extrapolating neural consolidation theory to previous work on serial position effects led to the predictions that (1) arousal facilitates primacy; (2) arousal…

The usefulness of the method of memory judgments as a tool for studying human memory was explored in this research. The first experiments involved the nature of the information about when an event occurred, the spacing of repetitions of an event, and presentation modality of an event. Results suggested that time and spacing are represented in…

This study is based on an earlier investigation by Brant and Trabasso, in which it was demonstrated that 4-year-old children could perform transitive inferences when training forced information encoding by involving questions about two comparative dimensions of an object (long and short). The present study was designed to examine the sources of…

Sixty of the possible beginning phonemes of English monosyllables were paired with the vowel /a/ in nonsense syllables, and used in illustrative one-syllable words. The sixty manners of commencing words had been scaled in terms of their relative perceptual similarity-dissimilarity in sounds. Both syllables and words were divided into three levels…

Human individuals, social organizations and societies are alike in that their knowledge of past events is to some extent maintained and brought to bear on their behavior. On the individual level we know quite a bit of how this is accomplished. However, on the social level we know close to nothing. It is not the task of this paper to ascertain the…

This research was directed at determining whether the new item priority (NIP) effect in free recall was a result of an experimental artifact produced by the joint action of the serial position effect and the randomization of items over trials, or a consequence of a strategy of recalling newer items before older ones. In the experiment, subjects…

Studied was memory for visually and auditorily presented stimuli in 29 institutionalized, mantally handicapped children, 29 normal second and third graders, and 29 5- and 6-year-old children enrolled in a Head Start program. Lists of visually and auditorily presented stimuli were learned by the three subject groups. Results indicated that trials…

This report describes eight experiments dealing with intentional forgetting. The results of the first experiment indicated that not attempting to recall items did not affect appreciably the later recall of these items. The second, third, and fourth experiments indicated that with blocked intra-serial cuing, the more processing allotted to an item,…

Do children integrate pronoun sentences in memory as adults seem to do, i.e., processing anaphoric reference between two propositions into a form in which their common element is represented only once (jointly) for the two propositions? Data from two experiments involving third and fourth grade students revealed that a few very vivid sentences…

This experiment tested the hypothesis that paired-associate learning accompanied by high arousal should lead to stronger permanent memory and weaker immediate memory than paired-associate learning accompanied by low arousal. During continuous recording of skin resistance and heart rate as measures of arousal, 32 Ss were given a one-trial,…

The model as currently developed consists of three major aspects: contexting, operation, and memory. The contexting aspects of the model are concerned with the higher level cognitive behavior associated with selection of appropriate behavior, maintenance of goals-directedness, and evaluation of completed behaviors. The operational aspects of the…