A topic of increasing interest in social cognition is the manner in which individuals organize information about others in their memories and then access the information when making a decision. In the first study, subjects made both negatively and positively phrased judgments; trait set size was then varied as a within-subjects factor while…

To understand a text, a reader must engage in three important cognitive activities--recognition, comprehension, and memory. Based on this premise, two experiments were conducted with children to assess individual and developmental differences in speed of word recognition and how these differences related to performance on a variety of memory…

A study was conducted as part of a program to develop and test an individual level communications model. The model proposes that audience members bring to communications situations a set of learned cognitive processing strategies that produce cognitive structural representations of information in memory to facilitate the meeting of the various…

This paper presents a developmental study of the effects of item rehearsal on children's short term memory. Two experiments are discussed. The first, involving second and sixth grade children, concerned the relationship between item retrieval ability and rehearsal strategies in item recall. The design of the experiment involved varying the visual…

Thirty impulsive and 30 reflective EMR (educable mentally retarded) Black students (9-12 years old) were administered conjunctive concept attainment tasks with or without a memory aid. Repeated measures analyses of variance were used to examine the effects of the independent variables (cognitive tempo, presence or absence of a memory aid, and…

Two hypotheses were tested in three experiments concerned with the componential storage of meaning. The complexity hypothesis predicted that a verb with many subpredicates would lead to poor memory strength between the surrounding nouns. The connectivity hypothesis predicted that verbs with many subpredicates would lead to greater memory strength…

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…