Two research studies were conducted to examine short term memory capacity and eye fixations as parts of the reading comprehension process. In the first study, varied aspects of the text and the readers' tasks were examined by monitoring the duration and sequence of readers' eye fixations. The results showed that readers made longer pauses at…

Competence in action perception seems to be achieved very early in life. Because research has indicated that competent perceivers of action must be able to discriminate breakpoints in behavior, then recognition memory for breakpoints should be superior to that for nonbreakpoints at all ages where competence in action perception exists. Two studies…

Fifty-three deaf and thirty-three hearing college students observed a videotaped lecture followed by a 15 minute period of reviewing prepared class notes. Two days later, half of each group again reviewed the notes before taking a test measuring learning outcomes in four areas: recall, recognition, concept acquisition, and problem solving.…

College undergraduates participated in a cost/benefit analysis and a speed/accuracy analysis of semantic priming in a lexical decision task. In both studies, half the cues were neutral and half were words from 30 semantic categories. Word targets were the category names, and nonword targets were derived from those names. The cue-word was valid 80%…

A Sample of 576 children participated in a study to determine the manner in which children retain narrative material, what information they retain, and the effects of sex and age upon these aspects of memory. The children, ranging in age from six to eight years, listened to a tape recorded story in individual sessions. Half of them were asked to…

This report contains a variety of material. There is first a brief summary of work done under the contract. This is followed by a detailed outline of a graduate seminar entitled "Modern Topics in Measurement and Scaling III." The six major divisions are: (1) introduction and philosophy of measurement; (2) mathematical and axiomatic foundations of…

The aim of this conference was to consider current thinking on behavior modification and social education, and to examine ways in which the psychological and educational concepts and skills involved in these approaches could best be taught to nurses. Over 40 nurse tutors, clinical teachers, and inservice training officers attended the conference.…

This selective bibliography of recent publications by Rand researchers in the Information Processing Systems research program includes only those papers concerned with the broad range of topics in cognitive science. These topics include the modeling of complex human behavior, the construction of intelligent computer systems, and the representation…

In this study of children's memory, two types of presentation modes (pictures or words) were crossed with two levels of memory strategy ("make a picture in your mind" or "think of the word") to comprise four treatments: see picture/think picture, see picture/think word, see word/think picture, see word/think word. The study was conducted with 144…

An experiment, which replicates an earlier study conducted in Sweden, was performed to study the effects of prior knowledge of relevant subject matter on reading comprehension and on memory. Fifty college students read one of two contrasting passages that presented two opposing points of view after they had recorded their beliefs about the subject…

Intended for graduate students in special education, the text presents seven author contributed papers dealing with theoretical issues in the field. M. Faust and W. Faust ("Cognitive Constructing: Levels of Processing and Developmental Change") consider cognitive processing from a developmental perspective. In "Memory Processes in Exceptional…

The skilled performance of conference interpreters has aroused some interest of late, both on the part of interpreters interested in studying their own complex skills, and of psychologists interested in cognitive behavior. Recent theories in this field have concentrated on information processing aspects of the task, and on the role of anticipatory…

This study examined the effect of the occurrence of homophones in instructional materials on the learning of new vocabulary. Forty-two junior high school seventh graders were randomly assigned to two groups of 21 each. Group one was exposed to a set of six slides that showed sentences using homophonic pairs of words (juxtaposed sentences) and then…

This experiment examined two processes which might account for developmental increases in accuracy in visual recognition tasks: age-related increases in efficiency of scanning during inspection, and age-related increases in the ability to make decisions systematically during test. Critical details necessary for recognition were highlighted as…