In the first part of this study, we investigated effects of item and task type on span performance in a group of aphasic individuals with word processing and STM deficits. Group analyses revealed significant effects of item on span performance with span being greater for digits than for words. We also investigated associations between subjects'…

Phonological and metaphonological skills are explored in 97 Brazilian illiterate and semiliterate adults. A simple letter- and word-reading task was used to define the degree of illiteracy. Phonemic awareness was strongly dependent on the level of letter and word reading ability. Phonological memory was very low in illiterates and unrelated to…

Discourse context may affect comprehension of a word in a text by facilitating lexical access or by facilitating integration of the target concept with the preceding text. In two experiments, we used eye tracking measures to examine contextual influence on the integration of role fillers in scripted narratives. In both experiments, context had an…

Retrieval-induced forgetting is the failure to recall a previously studied word following repeated retrieval of a related item. It has been argued that this is due to retrieval competition between practiced and unpracticed items, which results in inhibition of the non-recalled item, detectable with an independent cue at final test. Three…

Pitch constancy, perceiving the same pitch from tones with differing spectral shapes, requires one to extract the fundamental frequency from two sets of harmonics and compare them. We previously showed this difficult task to be easier when tonal context is present, presumably because the context creates a tonal reference point from which to judge…

The goal of this study was to investigate how adult English speakers, who are good readers, but who differ in spelling ability, remember word-specific spelling information. In the first experiment, participants learned the spellings of words they had previously misspelled, while "thinking out loud." The main strategies observed in order of…

Data from 33 separate studies were combined to create an aggregate data set consisting of 16 cognitive variables and 6832 different individuals who ranged between 18 and 95 years of age. Analyses were conducted to determine where in a hierarchical structure of cognitive abilities individual differences associated with age, gender, education, and…

To determine whether the visuospatial n-back working memory task is a reliable and valid measure of cognitive processes believed to underlie intelligence, this study compared the reaction times and accuracy of performance of 70 participants, with performance on the Multidimensional Aptitude Battery (MAB). Testing was conducted over two sessions…

Substitution tests have a long history in psychology because of their simplicity of administration and their sensitivity to individual differences related to complex cognitive performance. Despite their widespread use there is no agreement on what the substitution test measures. The present study approached this question by applying a method of…

Confirmatory factor analysis of Australian adaptations of combined Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) and Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised (WMS-R) scores was conducted in a sample of 277 participants undergoing investigation for neurological disorders. The best-fitting model was a six-factor model representing the latent abilities of…

Research with anxious and depressed adults has suggested that anxiety is related to an increased anticipation of both negative memories and negative expectancies whereas depression is related to a reduction in positive memories and expectancies. The present study examined whether anxiety and depression in 123 school-aged adolescents would show the…

Previous studies have shown that an aphasic patient (AB) with a semantic short-term memory deficit (STM) had difficulties comprehending and producing sentences with structures that demanded the simultaneous retention of several individual word meanings (Martin & Freedman, 2001a, 2001b; Martin & Romani, 1994; Martin, Shelton, & Yaffee, 1994). The…

Theoretically, prospective memory retrieval can be accomplished either by controlled monitoring of the environment for a target event or by a more reflexive process that spontaneously responds to the presence of a target event. These views were evaluated in Experiments 1-4 by examining whether performing a prospective memory task produced costs on…

Attention and working memory limitations set strict limits on visual representations, yet researchers have little appreciation of how these limits constrain the acquisition of information in ongoing visually guided behavior. Subjects performed a brick sorting task in a virtual environment. A change was made to 1 of the features of the brick being…

In March 2003, "Psychological Science" published an article by Goodman and colleagues examining memory for prior childhood abuse in a sample of adolescents and young adults who as children had been the victims of childhood abuse that led to criminal prosecution. At the time of the prosecution cases, the children in this study had been part of a…