Successful reading demands the ability to combine visual-phonological information into a single representation and is associated with an efficient short-term memory. Reading disability may consequently involve an impaired working memory binding of visual and phonological information. The present study proposes two span tasks for assessing…

The learning-style theory of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (Qian, Lipkin, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5:77, 2011) states that ASD individuals differ from neurotypics in the way they learn and store information about the environment and its structure. ASD would rather adopt a "lookup-table" strategy (LUT: memorizing each…

It is broadly agreed that the processing of a word triad with a common remote associate (coherent triad) leads to its partial activation, which is the process underlying intuitive coherence judgments. The present studies demonstrate that this process not only is independent of the intention to find the common associate (CA), but rather may be…

The authors investigated the strategic component (i.e., elaboration and organization of episodic features) and the associative component (i.e., binding processes) of episodic memory and their interactions in 4 age groups (10-12, 13-15, 20-25, and 70-75 years of age). On the basis of behavioral and neural evidence, the authors hypothesized that the…

This study evaluated how people learn about encoding strategy effectiveness in an associative memory task. Individuals studied two lists of paired associates under instructions to use either a normatively effective strategy (interactive imagery) or a normatively ineffective strategy (rote repetition) for each pair. Questionnaire ratings of imagery…

The nature of the relationship between words and music in memory has been studied in a variety of ways, from investigations of listeners' recall for the words of songs stored in long-term memory to recall for novel information set to unfamiliar melodies. We asked singers to perform an unaccompanied song from memory following deliberate learning…

Available experimental evidence is reviewed concerning the keyword method, a two-stage procedure for remembering materials having an associative component. The review examines subjects' memory for definitions, given vocabulary words; subjects' learning of other aspects of vocabulary, given definitions; group-administered keyword studies; and…

This study investigates the effectiveness of three methods of learning vocabulary among 778 beginning second language (L2) learners. Rote memorization consists of memorizing the first language (L1) translation of a new L2 word by rehearsal. Semantic mapping displays L1 words conceptually related to the L2 word in a diagram. The keyword method…

The ability to remember visual stimuli over a short delay period is limited by the small capacity of visual working memory (VWM). Here the authors investigate the role of learning in enhancing VWM. Participants saw 2 spatial arrays separated by a 1-s interval. The 2 arrays were identical except for 1 location. Participants had to detect the…

Describes a study in which 26 learners of Hebrew as a second language were trained to generate associations of their own choosing to new vocabulary items. Their use of these and new associations was then examined during recall tasks over a period of a month. (Author/MES)

An associative model of serial learning is described based on the assumption that the effective stimulus for a serial-list item is generated by adaptation-level coding of the item's ordinal position. How the model can generate predictions of aspects of serial-learning data is illustrated. (SLD)

Incentive motivation effects on stimulus encoding of elementary school students was investigated by pairing words associated with two levels of semantic elaboration with two levels of monetary rewards and testing through recall. (CM)

Distinguished experimentally between the learner's use of independent grapheme-phoneme correspondences and determined whether in the initial year of reading instruction sublexical relations can be formed. Results could not be given alternative explanations by the developmental bypass hypothesis nor by accounts which predict exclusive use of onset…