Two longitudinal studies of expert-level cognitive skills and their acquisition are reported. The first study focused on the skill of an otherwise normal subject who increased his digit-span to over 100 digits with 4.5 years of practice using the mnemonic system developed by W. G. Chase and K. A. Ericsson. The second study followed two college…

Although memory was one of the five canons of classical rhetoric, the more contemporary, narrower definition of memory as the training of the mind to remember certain things has eliminated memory as a useful rhetorical canon. However, teachers of writing who do regard memory highly, can redefine memory to restore it as one of the canons of…

Two studies examined the effects of on-line processing and memory-based processing on the transfer of analogy problem-solving strategies. Male and female college students (N=189) were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups and a control group. Each experimental condition involved a different type of training strategy (advice,…

The way cognitive, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can aid in further understanding of memory span change in children is discussed. ERPs are time-dependent changes in electrical activity of the brain (as recorded by scalp electrodes) following the presentation of a physical stimulus through auditory, visual, or somatosensory modalities. The…

The present study assessed the effects that the density of an array has on two aspects of memory: the ability to recall a group of items and the ability to place these items in their original locations. First-graders, fourth-graders, and college students were asked to memorize 16 common objects presented in either a dense array or a spaced array.…

A series of studies has investigated the possibility that human infants performing tasks exhibit something like the P300, a positive-going brain wave associated with task performance and the updating of working memory among adults. Findings indicate that, when infants have the opportunity to form a template against which to compare a previously…

How various types of repetition influence the development of memory for real-world events was investigated in a naturalistic case study of a 2-year-old's autobiographic memories as revealed in mother-child conversation recorded when the child was between 21 and 27 months of age. Two types of repetition were studied: repeated recall of the same…

There are two dominant approaches to understanding human memory, one in the tradition of Ebbinghaus, the other in the tradition of Bartlett. The former approach views learning as the formation of associations, while the latter views memory as the process of reconstruction of fragments based on prior knowledge. These positions are often considered…

Tests of spatial ability that were designed to minimize the effects of sociocultural expectations on performance were administered to adults of both sexes. The tests examined spatial problem-solving, spatial memory, and psychomotor spatial performance, as measured by three "throwing tasks." Thirty-four male and 34 female university…

For each work assignment, photojournalists must decide whether to use black-and-white or color film and how to frame the picture. These decisions are considered crucial, yet little is known about how the presence of color and design complexity affect how people process the information in photographs. A study tested whether color and design…

This essay considers whether the brain can accelerate the speed with which it absorbs or dispenses information in ways similar to those of a computer, and, if so, whether any of these speed-up approaches increase the speed of the processing of the information in the brain. It is suggested that there are tasks for which speed is important in both…

The first section of this manual provides background on storytelling and the importance of storytelling for children, describes the essential elements of the storytelling process, and discusses the place of storytelling in the schools. Language arts and creative skills developed by storytelling are also identified. Guidelines for choosing a story,…

Self-efficacy, or a person's perception of his/her own mastery of a skill, affects subsequent task performance and predictions of future performance. To examine older adults' metamemorial knowledge with respect to predicting their performance on everyday and laboratory memory tasks, 28 adults (22 females, 6 males), aged 58 to 80 years, completed a…

This paper reviews work on the representation of knowledge from within psychology and artificial intelligence. The work covers the nature of representation, the distinction between the represented world and the representing world, and significant issues concerned with propositional, analogical, and superpositional representations. Specific topics…