Reasoning and logical thinking can be defined and explained from different perspectives. Three approaches are reviewed in this report; they are: (1) the logical structure approach; (2) the Piagetian approach of developmental stages; and (3) the information processing or memory approach. Four hypotheses related to these approaches were investigated…

The study attempted to further clarify the relationship between speed and memory span by directly examining whether slower identification of item information is the source of span difficulties in learning disabled (LD) children. Forty-eight sixth grade boys participated in the study, 24 LD and 24 non-LD. The method involved pretesting each subject…

Two experiments investigated relationships between state anxiety, memory processes, and children's performance on problem-solving tasks. Participants were second and sixth graders in a private elementary school in Redlands, California. In both experiments, subjects responded to three training and eight test problems presented in the introtact…

Reported are some investigations of the use of discovery learning techniques on retention. (PEB)

The test group was composed of thirty 8-to 12-year-old males. (CH)

Thirty-six newborn infants were exposed to a visual stimulus until habituation was demonstrated; subjects were then presented with the same target or one of either moderate or large discrepancy from the standard stimulus. Following habituation, female infants displayed greater recovery of attention to moderate stimulus change. (SDH)

The present experiments test two plausible interpretations of the effect of frequency on relative recency judgments. (Editor)

Children, 24-36 months old, were studied in an effort to examine the influence of cognitive development on the nature of information extracted from stimuli and coded into memory. (ST)

College undergraduates read a story about two boys playing hooky from school from the perspective of either a burglar or a person interested in buying a home. After recalling the story once, subjects were directed to shift perspectives and then recall the story again. In two experiments, subjects produced on the second recall significantly more…

After presenting a brief description of the principles of a story grammar, some experimental results are summarized to illustrate the power of story schemata in controlling recall. Specially constructed versions of four stories were used with second, fourth, and sixth graders and in a second experiment with adults. One version of each story was…

The hypothesis that pragmatic inferences presented in text are taken for granted, superficially processed, and not stably or enduringly represented in memory was investigated. Stories were read which in some conditions contained information vitiating the implicational force of explicit inferences. The vitiating information was presented either…

This pilot study investigated some relationships between tested ability variables and processing parameters obtained from memory search and visual search tasks. The 25 undergraduates who participated had also participated in a previous investigation by Chiang and Atkinson. A battery of traditional ability tests and several film tests were…

Since not everything that is understood is remembered and not everything that is remembered is understood, models of language processing should be able to make a distinction between comprehension and memory. To this end, a case is made for a spreading activation process as being the essential ingredient of the comprehension process. Concepts…

Subjects (n=24), 12 of whom were in the age range of 18-30 years and 12 of whom were between 55-65 years, performed two semantic memory tasks. Results suggested that subjects in the older group may have retrieved information faster than the young subjects, but that they required longer to decide upon a response. (Author)

Examines the inhibition of recall of list items when extralist items are introduced, and describes experiments which suggest that this is an expression of a more general inhibition phenomenon. (Author/AM)