A traditional cued recall task and an item recognition priming paradigm were used to assess the locus of associative memory difficulties in learning-disabled children. Results for 24 learning-disabled and 24 nondisabled sixth graders are discussed within the explicit and implicit memory framework of P. Graf and D. L. Schacter (1985). (TJH)

An associative model of serial learning is described based on the assumption that the effective stimulus for a serial-list item is generated by adaptation-level coding of the item's ordinal position. How the model can generate predictions of aspects of serial-learning data is illustrated. (SLD)

Two experiments examined role of affective correspondence between signal and outcome in 4-month olds' associative learning. Found that only when consoling infant-directed speech signaled the sad face did infants' visual interest in a checkerboard increase. Arousing infant-directed speech signaling either the smiling or sad face produced positive…

A word association experiment examined conceptual representation in bilingual memory. Dutch-English bilinguals associated twice to nouns and verbs that varied on concreteness and cognate status. Findings suggest that conceptual representation in bilingual memory depends on word-type and grammatical class: concrete translations, cognates, and noun…

The purpose of this experiment was to compare components of the human and rat auditory event-related potential (ERP) in a serial feature-positive discrimination task. Subjects learned to respond to an auditory target stimulus when it followed a visual feature (X [right arrow] A+), but to not respond when it was presented alone (A-). Upon solving…

We examine the influence of inferring interlocutors' referential intentions from their body movements at the early stage of lexical acquisition. By testing human participants and comparing their performances in different learning conditions, we find that those embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word-meaning association. In…

Idiom comprehension was assessed in 10 aphasic patients with semantic deficits by means of a string-to-picture matching task. Patients were also submitted to an oral explanation of the same idioms, and to a word comprehension task. The stimuli of this last task were the words following the verb in the idioms. Idiom comprehension was severely…

The orbitofrontal cortex contains the secondary taste cortex, in which the reward value of taste is represented. It also contains the secondary and tertiary olfactory cortical areas, in which information about the identity and also about the reward value of odours is represented. The orbitofrontal cortex also receives information about the sight…

The murine vibrissae sensorimotor system has been scrutinized as a target of motor learning through trace classical conditioning. Conditioned eyelid responses were acquired by using weak electrical whisker-pad stimulation as conditioned stimulus (CS) and strong electrical periorbital stimulation as unconditioned stimulus (US). In addition,…

We studied the effects of a selective lesion in rats, with 192-IgG-saporin, of the cholinergic neurons located in the medial septum/diagonal band (MSDB) complex on the acquisition of classical and instrumental conditioning paradigms. The MSDB lesion induced a marked deficit in the acquisition, but not in the retrieval, of eyeblink classical…

Courtship conditioning is an associative learning paradigm in "Drosophila melanogaster," wherein male courtship behavior is modified by experience with unreceptive, previously mated females. While the training experience with mated females involves multiple sensory and behavioral interactions, the authors hypothesized that female cuticular…

This report described and analyzed different methods for constructing a student's cognitive map in order to study the development and use of domain-specific prior knowledge. Cognitive maps provide accounts of student trajectories over courses and individual or group profiles of learners' strengths and weaknesses at the course or multicourse level.…

This paper describes the mental model children have of their own learning, derived from their behaviors when learning a song. The basic assumption of the study is that behavior is an outward expression of a psychological entity. The song chosen for the study was a complex, unfamiliar Zulu song. Thirty-six children in three age groups participated…

Explicit representation of relations plays some role in virtually all higher cognitive processes, but relational knowledge has seldom been investigated systematically. This paper considers how relational knowledge is involved in some tasks that have been important to cognitive development, including transitivity, the balance scale, classification…

Adapting strategies of invention from the new process-oriented rhetoric, the literature teacher can help students understand what they read through prereading exercises. Presenting students with an abstract model of a text's metaphoric structure, the teacher can spark students' immediate and imaginative response to the model, involving them…