A case is made for the construction of nomothetic theories that can also explain individual differences. The discussion uses examples from the memory area and presents an approach to memory that explains individual findings and individual differences in the context of a single model. (SLD)

A theory of visual information acquisition and visual memory is described that conjoins two models that have been used to describe low-level perceptual and higher level cognitive processes. Six experiments with 21 adult observers generally support the theory, although some weakness is discussed. (SLD)

Responds to previous article by Fincham, Beach, Moore, and Diener (this issue) on child sexual abuse. Focuses on importance of recognizing that attempts to reduce probability of false claims of child abuse would result in increasing probability of missing true claims of child abuse. Offers hypothesis-testing framework as useful heuristic for…

This study of 20 3-month-old infants with Down's syndrome and 20 nondisabled infants found that both groups were successfully trained to produce movement in an overhead crib mobile by kicking, and displayed long-term retention a week later. Conditioning and retention-test performance of the two groups did not differ. (Author/JDD)

Describes research on memory in preschool children. Each child was studied for scene and list memory. Domain-specific and general knowledge were not found to be strongly related to memory performance. Object typicality did not have a strong effect on memory, but size did. (GH)

Lexical, syntactic, structural, and semantic analyses were performed on essays written by 100 younger and 100 older adults. Few lexical or syntactic differences appeared. Older adults were less able to use more complex structure and semantics. Educational level and working memory were probably responsible for the differences. (SK)

Children's ability to remember and report past mental states was examined. Four-year olds were able to report all past mental states. Three-year olds reported past pretenses, images, and perceptions well; desires and intentions with moderate difficulty; and beliefs with great difficulty. (BC)

Children with speech disorders had lower short-term memory capacity and smaller word length effect than control children. Children with speech disorders also had reduced speech-motor activity during rehearsal. Results suggest that speech rate may be a causal determinant of verbal short-term memory capacity. (BC)

The addition of idiosyncratic features to individual members of an artificially constructed category enhanced specific item memory among 13 month olds, but not among 10 month olds. Discussion of findings focuses on their theoretical implications and the nature of the age difference. (RH)

Examines memory for visual narratives as a function of cinematic structure. Identifies two important principles (establishing shots and directional continuity) for restructuring real-world activities into coherent filmed sequences. (SR)

This article presents an extended version of the convolution-correlation memory model TODAM (theory of distributed associative memory) that eliminates some inadequacies of previous versions and provides a unified treatment of item, associative, and serial-order information. TODAM2 extends the chunking model to provide a general model for episodic…

Describes two memory-enhancing techniques, visualization and concrete reconstruction, that have been successful in counseling adult survivors of sexual abuse. Includes suggested implementations, case examples, and implications for incorporating memory techniques into counseling process. Describes various risk factors involved in using these…

Accuracy and determination of feeling of knowing (FOK) were studied in 3 experiments involving 78 Israeli undergraduates using a unified model of FOK. Results challenge the view that FOK is based on a direct, privileged access to an internal monitor. (SLD)

This study of six adolescents with brain injuries, and six controls, investigated the influence of working memory load on performance of a task designed to measure receptive syntax ability. The performance of the adolescents with brain injuries was significantly worse than that of controls. (Author/CR)

Presents a conjoint recognition paradigm and a model that quantifies conscious and unconscious memory for learned materials and for the types of unlearned materials found to induce false memories in children. Validation study showed that model accounted for 7- and 10-year-olds' performance on recognition memory task. Conscious and unconscious…