The work reported aims at the construction of a sufficient theory of transition in cognitive development. The method of theory construction employed is computer simulation of cognitive process. The core of the model of transition presented comprises self-modification processes that, as a result of continuously monitoring an exhaustive record of…

By 1960 there was a strongly developed theory of learning in which learning was considered as change of behavior. Neobehaviorist theories and then formal stochastic models analyzed processes in which probabilities of responses are altered. In the 1960's, analysis of learning as a discrete change between states of knowledge or stages of processing…

Cognitive science is a science of intelligence, of knowledge and its uses. Research is psychological theory follows four major themes: Perception, Attention, Memory, and Performance. Only when the range of cognitive mechanisms and functions is known, can possible theoretical approaches characterizing human thought and cognition be distinguished.…

Eighty-nine college students with varying levels of divergent thinking aptitude participated in a study focusing on the processing of concrete and abstract stimuli. The subjects were administered three divergent thinking instruments. Their processing of concrete and abstract stimuli was studied in two separate free-response tasks. It was…

To determine whether comprehension as measured by retelling relates to comprehension as measured by cloze and whether comprehension as measured by retelling changes as retelling is manipulated, a study involving 40 fifth grade students was undertaken. The students were ranked according to their scores on a standardized comprehension test and then…

Deficits involving metamemory (knowledge about memory) were investigated for elderly individuals in unfamiliar laboratory tasks. In Experiment I, 23 college age subjects and 23 active, community dwelling elderly subjects, roughly matched on socioeconomic status, were given a picture span estimation task, a test of actual span, and then a recall…

The purpose of this book is to contribute to an understanding of the nature of reading so that teachers can decide how to teach children in a way that will enable children to make sense of what they read. The process of reading, the perceptual and language skills involved in reading, the nature of memory and comprehension, and the way that…

The auditory/verbal short-term memory of 64 college students was examined across a wide range of retention intervals (5 seconds to 60 seconds). High attention during interpolated processing was ensured by monitoring rehearsal with a combination of methods, and errors were analyzed for evidence of proactive and intra-unit interference. Recall of…

Forty-eight first grade students participated in a three-fold study to (1) examine the effect of repeated exposure to text on memory for prose as determined through retelling, (2) determine how low and high comprehending students performed on this task, and (3) determine if males would perform as well as females on the task. The subjects were…

The purposes of this experiment were: (1) to examine the development of categorical representations by comparing the performance of children of various ages to adults, and (2) to compare the internal representations of basic level and superordinate categories. Subjects were 48 children (in second, fourth and sixth grades) and 16 adults. The…

This paper describes an approach to task analysis which seeks to identify potential sources of difficulty in the self-discovery of improved procedures by students who have been taught simpler procedures. The approach considers novices' procedures in terms of the changes needed to produce an expert procedure; the knowledge required to make those…

In order to determine if infants possessed contingency awareness and if it were related to a temporal unit, two hypotheses were constructed. (1) Reinforcement of a response would probably lead to emission of that response only if the infant's next response occurred within a period of time during which he could remember the preceding…

Mentally retarded subjects who could read were tested on their ability to pronounce words and to produce meaningful associates. Analyses of their responses indicated an overuse of a strategy of memorizing words as a way to recognize words in print and an inability to consider word meanings in terms of abstract referents. A comparison of these…

This study investigated whether recall of expository information by a learner will be affected by the mode or combination of modes through which the information is presented. Subjects, 359 fifth-grade students, were randomly stratified into four treatment groups on the basis of sex and reading ability. Treatment for each of the groups was as…

This study investigated five ability tests related to the water-jug problem. Previous analyses identified two processes used during solution: means-ends analysis and memory of visited states. Subjects were 240 undergraduate psychology students. A real-time computer system presented the problem and recorded responses. Ability tests were paper and…