Obtained self-reports of memory abilities and skills from 50 younger and 50 older adults. General rating questions and specific questions about memory for certain types of content were included. Consistent age-related decrements were found only for general questions, especially those assessing perceived changes over time. Less consistent…

Discusses laws and general characteristics of normal memory, specifying how exceptional memory feats deviate from and contradict them. Also discusses research in support of the assertion that normal memory structure is sufficient to explain exceptional memory feats, if differences in practice and prior experiences are taken into account.…

Three experiments demonstrated that increasing the length of a mobile serial list impaired 6-month olds' memory for serial order. Findings indicated that the primacy effect was absent on a 24-hour delayed recognition test and was exhibited on a reactivation test, adding to growing evidence that young infants possess two functionally distinct…

Digit span and latency from P300 component of event-related brain potential--a measure of stimulus evaluation time--were obtained from children and adults. Increases in digit span were associated with decreases in peak latency for children but not adults, suggesting that immediate memory development is tightly coupled with decreases in speed of…

The study involving 24 normal, 24 learning disabled (LD), and 18 deaf elementary-age Ss investigated the hypothesis that nonstrategic verbal encoding abilities are deficient in LD readers. Results were interpreted to indicate a deficient verbal-visual integrative process in disabled children occurring prior to the application of mnemonic…

This study of 429 nonclinical adults found that similar proportions of those reporting histories of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse reported that they had periods without memory of their abuse. The enormous variance in reported quality of childhood memories and the common recovery of forgotten childhood memories were both found to be…

Evaluates the effectiveness of a nine-week memory notebook treatment for closed-head-injured (CHI) participants with memory deficits. Eight participants who had sustained a severe CHI were allocated to receive either notebook training or supportive therapy. At posttreatment, the notebook training group reported fewer significant memory failures,…

The capacity of six-month-old infants to maintain information in working memory for several seconds was studied using two versions of an oculomotor delayed response task. The results indicated that infants maintained information about stimulus locations in working memory for three to five seconds. (MDM)

Long-term recall memory was assessed in 14- and 16 month-olds using a nonverbal method requiring subjects to reenact a past event from memory. The results demonstrated significant deferred imitation after delays of two and four months, and that the toddlers retained and imitated multiple acts. (MDM)

Investigated the mechanisms responsible for short-term memory span and its development by examining the relationship between memory span and speech rate for words and nonwords in 2 groups of children, ages 5 to 6 and 9 to 11. Both age groups showed evidence of a relationship between speech rate and memory span. (MDM)

Motor skill learning is a dynamic process that continues covertly after training has ended and eventually leads to delayed increments in performance. Current theories suggest that this off-line improvement takes time and appears only after several hours. Here we show an early transient and short-lived boost in performance, emerging as early as…

This study employed structural equation modeling to examine the effects of Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) abilities on reading decoding skills using five age-differentiated subsamples from the standardization sample of the Woodcock-Johnson III (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001). Using the Spearman Model including only g, strong direct effects of g on…

The word length effect has been a central feature of theorising about immediate memory. The notion that short-term memory traces rapidly decay unless refreshed by rehearsal is based primarily upon the finding that serial recall for short words is better than that for long words. The decay account of the word length effect has come under pressure…