The emergence of strategic verbal rehearsal at around 7 years of age is widely considered a major milestone in descriptions of the development of short-term memory across childhood. Likewise, rehearsal is believed by many to be a crucial factor in explaining why memory improves with age. This apparent qualitative shift in mnemonic processes has…

Three experiments examined the immediate free recall (IFR) of auditory-verbal and visuospatial materials from single-modality and dual-modality lists. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with between 1 and 16 spoken words, with between 1 and 16 visuospatial dot locations, or with between 1 and 16 words "and" dots with synchronized…

Learning sequential structures is of fundamental importance for a wide variety of human skills. While it has long been debated whether implicit sequence learning is perceptual or response-based, here we propose an alternative framework that cuts across this dichotomy and assumes that sequence learning rests on associative changes that can occur…

The behavioural phenotype of velocardiofacial syndrome (VCFS), one of the most common human multiple anomaly syndromes, includes developmental disabilities, frequently including intellectual disability (ID) and high risk of diagnosis of psychotic disorders including schizophrenia. VCFS may offer a model of the relationship between ID and risk of…

Eighty boys and 80 girls ages 9 to 10 from elementary schools in Naples, Italy completed a spatial span test and a spatial serial-learning task. Corsi's block-tapping test was used in each. Males performed better in both cases; their superior performance on the spatial serial-learning task was independent of their superiority in the spatial-span…

Used a variance-partitioning procedure to identify age-related and age-invariant components of verbal and spatial memory span in 6- to 12-year olds. Concluded that verbal and spatial short-term memory appear to rely on similar processes when serial recall is required and that development in span is closely tied to increases in processing speed.…

This study investigated the impact of recency effect on multiple rule-based problem solving in an interactive multimedia environment. Forty-five college students were recruited and assigned to two groups: synchronized and unsynchronized interactive multimedia groups based on their spatial ability score. Results show that students in the…

In a multiple baseline design, a teenager with a mental age of four years was taught two abstractions. One was the oddity principle (selecting the one object in a group which differs from the rest). The other was seriation (aligning objects along a continuum of size, and inserting new objects into their proper places in the alignments). These…