An experiment contrasted the predictions of two explanations of the cognitive review process of the post-passage adjunct question paradigm. The questions presented to 104 college students quizzed either information high in the organizational structure of the expository prose passage or information low in the structure. The top-down-search…

Two experiments involving 36 deaf college students investigated the amounts of information remembered by students from the different quarters of a lecture and the effect of printed vs. interpreted presentation of lecture material. In the first experiment, 20 deaf college students received an interpreted, videotaped presentation of one lecture and…

Based on the assumption that the design of instruction and the selection of technological supports can be based upon psychological understandings of what makes for a meaningful learning experience, this paper examines meaning in the context of two propositions about the nature of motivation and memory, and explores ways in which instructional…

In a study of individual differences in long-term memory access, university undergraduates verified (1) whether an item was a member of a category; (2) whether two items belonged in the same category; and (3) whether two words had the same name. Reaction times from these tasks were correlated with verbal ability, as measured by performance on a…

A propositional network system for representing the logical and semantic information contained in a text is described. The reliability of scoring information recalled from reading, using this representational system, is found to vary with the scoring goal. Determination of the amount of information recalled is found to be extremely reliable. A…

The cognitive input organization skill of clustering and its effect on recall were examined in 235 normal, learning disabled, and educable mentally retarded children within three mental age (MA) ranges (5 to 7 years, 7 to 9 years, and 9 to 11 years). Ss were assigned randomly to three conditions testing the effect of different levels of…

Sex differences in memory for human faces is reviewed. It is found that research evidence to date is not conclusive, but where differences exist they favor female superiority over males in facial memory. In particular, evidence is cited to suggest that females are reliably superior to males in their recognition memory for other females. This is…

Four groups of well-functioning senior citizens (6 males and 18 females per group) over the age of 65 were presented with a series of discrimination-learning problems. All were provided four pretraining problems, appropriate to their individual condition, and encouraging self-pacing. Two levels of problem complexity (four-dimensional vs.…

Forty elderly adults were required to memorize a list of 15 simple nouns belonging to three separate categories. The arrangement of the list of nouns (randomized or completely categorized) and instructions (instructed that the nouns could be in terms of categories or not instructed) were manipulated as factors. Individuals participating in the…

The present series of experiments was designed to examine the factors affecting the ability of people to draw inferences from a passage of text. It was found that, using a true-false recognition test, proportion correct was higher and reaction time shorter on inferred information than on information that was actually presented. This was the case…

The effectiveness of verbal and imaginal elaborations on the free recall of 50 educable mentally retarded adolescents was investigated. Ss were assigned to one of five conditions: experimenter-imposed verbalization (EV), experimenter imposed imagery (EI), subject-generated verbalization (SV), subject-generated imagery (SI), and control (C). Ss saw…

This study of children's memory was intended to: (1) extend a set of procedures used to study levels of processing in the memory of adults, and (2) study the development of the dynamic memory system unencumbered by developmentally influenced strategies in the areas of metamemory, encoding, organization and storage, and retrieval. Ninety-six…

If older children automatically label pictorial stimuli, then their performance should be impaired on tasks in which such labeling would increase the error rate. Children were asked to learn pairs of verbal or pictorial stimuli which, when combined, formed a different compound word (BUTTER-FLY). Subsequently, a false recognition test that included…

A major contribution of information-processing theory to the psychology of remembering is the concept of memory or information retrieval. Several theories of the fact retrieval processes of the human memory, which constitute a substrate for any cognitive ability requiring stored information, have drawn heavily on certain data processing…

This report describes a study of how maps are learned. Subjects (undergraduate students at the University of California) studied a simple map under various conditions and then answered questions about the map and drew the map from memory. It was found that local relations are learned before large-scale relations, that different types of map…