Two studies investigated whether variations in the importance of inferences and the salience of premises within a text would affect the probability that the inference would be made. Six stories of about 500 words were used, with eight variations of each story. The target inference, and its plausibility, was constant across all versions. Inference…

This paper describes an investigation of problem sequencing as part of a symposium presenting theoretical concerns and research findings regarding several diverse types of strategies for designing and presenting instructional materials. The first step involved analyzing a set of problems, to determine the knowledge (rules) required for solving the…

Recent publications of longitudinal and sequential analyses of psychometric data have been cited as evidence for "the myth of intellectual decline" with age. This term "myth" has been interpreted by many gerontologists to mean that intellectual functioning does not decline even late in life (except shortly before death). Furthermore, this…

The first section of this report examines, from a developmental perspective, the major theoretical positions dominating the literature on adult cognition. Two criteria are considered. First, how compatible are the theories with the notion that thinking systems develop within specific environments? Second, what are the implicit or explicit…

Investigates the relationship of subvocal speech to recall in 46 4- and 5-year-old children on three muscle sites: lip, chin, and a nonspeech control. (LLK)

In the present study an attempt was made to investigate the duality of encoding mechanisms via instructional sets that were independent of stimulus characteristics. (Author)

Definitions of four rare words were read to 259 undergraduates who were asked to record letters and syllables of the words, at the tip of the tongue. Results corresponded to an earlier study, with morpheme-like clusters evident. Results indicate an organizing memory system for words used in speech. (CHK)

Subjects studied and were tested for recognition and recall of target words on lists of cue-target word pairs. List-cued recall was higher than non-cued recall, suggesting that recognition failure is independent of subjects' familiarity with task requirements. This contradicts attribution of encoding specificity phenomena to subjects' confusion.…

The encoding processes of poor and average readers were compared in a short-term memory task. Since poor readers have difficulty in integrating audiovisual input, it was hypothesized that this pattern may be due to inadequate acoustic encoding. The results did not support the hypothesis. (Author/CS)

Children from kindergarten, second, and fifth grade were verbally presented a passage containing an equal number of idea units which were relevant versus irrelevant to the main theme of a story. For all grade levels, relevant idea units were recalled to a greater extent than idea units irrelevant to the main theme. (CS)

Reports a study attempting to measure the extent of the loss of knowledge of chemistry among physiology students, to determine the chemistry knowledge most frequently forgotten, and to devise a laboratory program to strengthen the chemistry background of the students. (EB)

Comprehension of a sentence entails constructing a particularized and elaborated mental representation, and this process depends more heavily on knowledge of the world and analysis of context than is generally appreciated. Existing associative or semantic network theories would be strained to accomodate this data. (Author/BJG)

An investigation of memory development using nonmetric multidimensional scaling. Judgments of similarities between complex objects were obtained from 5-year-olds and adults under two conditions: (1) when objects were simultaneously present at the time of comparison, and (2) when the objects were not simultaneously present and had to be compared on…