Words become associated following repeated co-occurrence episodes. This process might be further determined by the semantic characteristics of the words. The present study focused on how semantic and episodic factors interact in incidental formation of word associations. First, we found that human participants associate semantically related words…

The purpose of this research was to examine developmental changes in the knowledge about what variables affect performance on the incidental learning task. Kindergarteners, second graders, fifth graders, and college students indicated on a rating scale how many animals a hypothetical person would remember under easy and difficult levels of each…

Thirty learning-disabled and 30 nonhandicapped intermediate grade children were assessed on memory performance for stimulus words, which were presented with congruent and noncongruent rhyming words and semantically congruent and noncongruent sentence frames. Both groups performed significantly better on words encoded using deep level congruent…

Three experiments with 164 individuals between 4 and 80 years old examined age-related changes in explicit memory for three perceptual features: item identity, color, and location. Findings indicated that performance on explicit memory tests was not a consistent inverted U-shaped function of age across various features, but depended on the…

When 40 organically mentally retarded, 33 familial retarded, and 35 nonretarded school-age children were compared on 2 tasks of intentional memory, with mental age being covaried, the nonretarded children performed best, followed by the familial group. The 3 groups did not differ on a task of incidental learning. (Author/JDD)

Strategies of allocating attention to information and incidental learning task performance were assessed among 60 children from grades 2, 5, and 8. Children's predictions about their recall of incidental objects and answers to a posttest questionnaire provided verbal measures of their understanding of attention. (Author/RH)

Three experiments with preschoolers tested the independence of the current state buffer from working memory. Findings indicated that when a teddy bear was an object put away with other toys, only half the preschoolers remembered its location despite explicit instructions. When the teddy was a character interacting with children, all remembered its…

This study compared factors contributing to Quick Incidental Learning of new vocabulary by 50 5-year olds with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 comparison groups. Although SLI children exhibited a robust representational mapping ability, performance was modulated by a minimum input constraint and apparent problems with storage into…

A study was undertaken to investigate the effects of directed response training to focus attention and to assess the impact of pictorial integrated stimuli on incidental learning. A total of 140 second- and fifth-grade children were administered a two-choice discrimination learning task consisting of three parts: original learning, overtraining,…