Previous work has demonstrated that drugs increasing brain concentrations of acetylcholine can enhance cognition in aging and brain-damaged organisms. The present study assessed whether galantamine (GAL), an allosteric modulator of nicotinic cholinergic receptors and weak acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, could improve acquisition and retention of…

Author and book title recognition tests have been used extensively in reading-related research with both children and adults. The present paper reports the development of a book title and author recognition test and data from a UK sample of adults. Higher scores were obtained on the Author test than on the Title test. It is suggested that the…

Successful reading instruction entails not only acquiring new words but also remembering them after training has finished and accessing their word-specific representations when they are encountered in new text. We report two studies demonstrating that acquisition, retention, and transfer of unfamiliar words were affected differentially by isolated…

Great controversy exists on whether associative learning occurs without awareness. In Experiment 1, 31 participants received discrimination training by repeated presentations of two stimulus sequences (S1[subscript A] right arrow S2[subscript A], and S1[subscript B] right arrow S2[subscript B]), S1 being a masked stimulus. S2 were imperative…

The authors tested source memory across three conditions, one in which 3 strongly associated primes of a target word were presented in the same source as the target, one in which primes were presented in a different source than the target, and one in which no associates of targets were encoded. In the first 2 experiments, target source memory…

This article reviews evidence and theories concerning the nature of stimulus representations in Pavlovian conditioning. It focuses on the elemental approach developed in stimulus sampling theory (R. C. Atkinson & W. K. Estes, 1963; R. R. Bush & F. Mosteller, 1951b) and extended by I. P. L. McLaren and N. J. Mackintosh (2000, 2002) and contrasts…

This study investigated the prediction that playful activity would increase the number of alternate uses that children would be able to give for objects which are not involved in that activity. Subjects were 36 white, middle-class preschoolers. (Author/SDH)

Presents two studies which investigated the effects of social stimulation on infant's vocalization rates. Experiment I focused on response-contingent and response-independent social stimulation. Experiment II focused on continuous or omitted social stimulation. In both studies, social stimulation increased vocalization and the rate of responding…

The focus of this report was the degree of independence of memory attributes in determining performance. A demonstration experiment indicated that memory can carry an associative attribute and a frequency attribute simultaneously with little interaction between the two, that is, they were independent in their influence on performance. The…

Humor displayed during the administration of a work association test containing a gradually increasing number of sexual double entendres was observed in college students through remote control TV facilities. Persons who hold an internal locus of control smiled and laughed more than externals. Humor was differentiated in three ways: superiority,…

To examine the relationship between words that pinpoint or help to define other words, an experiment was designed which reversed the procedure used in collecting the Michigan Restricted Associated Norms. The Michigan procedure used stimulus words to elicit responses. These responses were used as clue words to determine their power to stimulate the…

Since prior knowledge is positively linked with reading comprehension, methods of measuring prior knowledge are important. A word association test is a useful technique for evaluating topic familiarity and enables the teacher to make decisions about how much additional information is needed for students to process a text successfully. (SRT)

Preschool children's ability to associate pairs of toys was studied under one of four experimental conditions. All three subject-involvement conditions produced better learning. (ST)

A preliminary scoring system is proposed for identifying creative individuals based on rapid opposite responding to the Kent-Rosanoff Word Association list. (Author/KM)