This study tested whether the word association employed by individual students could be used to predict their performance in a particular course. It was designed to explore a new method for describing the various models used in thinking and to determine whether this approach would yield results that were consonant with current cognitive theory. At…

The factors underlying memory performance in learning are shown to be affected by strategic processing and by automatic processing. Strategic processing is under the conscious control and effort of the learner while automatic processing is dependent on the strength of associations between new concepts and known concepts in a given domain.…

The extent to which an orienting activity exerts control over the encoding process was studied. Two experiments were reported in which associative meaningfulness was varied under conditions of semantic and nonsemantic processing. Both experiments showed effects of meaningfulness following both semantic and nonsemantic tasks. (Author/MH)

In this study, cognitive processes hypothesized to be relevant to the digit symbol task of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) were examined. Fifty-two undergraduate education students were divided into four groups to receive four different treatments. All the students took the digit symbol test, followed immediately by a test of their…

In 5 experiments involving 306 adults, the mechanisms underlying semantic priming in the domain of face recognition, particularly famous faces, and the plausibility of modularity were assessed. Results suggest that sensitivity changes that occur when direct associative connections within the module can be ruled out pose a problem for modularity.…

The keyword method was compared to the context method of learning new vocabulary in two experiments with undergraduate subjects. In both experiments the keyword method produced significantly greater definition recall. Implications for vocabulary learning theories in particular, and discovery learning approaches in general, are discussed.…

Twenty college students, ten each in the experimental and control groups, were the subjects of an experiment designed to demonstrate that integration of verb meanings occurs in connected discourse. Six paragraph-length stories, each of which included one or two critical sentences containing a general verb, were presented orally to the subjects.…

Describes how the study of established association patterns in the form of postulational-deductive systems can engender both learning and thinking. The authors used Darwin's theory of descent with modification to illustrate some parts of the above thesis. (HM)

Two experiments were conducted to determine the features of text to which skilled adult readers need to attend while reading and the features that either are of minimal importance or can be processed automatically without directed processing. In the first experiment, 12 college students attended to a timed picture naming task, in which a picture…

Three experiments report additional evidence that it is a mistake to account for all interletter effects solely in terms of sensory variables. These experiments attest to the importance of structural variables such as retina location, array size, and ordinal position. (Author/PN)

Although traditional learning theories are based on a demonstrative view of cognition, human beings tend to reason both demonstratively and dialectically. To examine the dialectical theory five studies were conducted. In the first study subjects rated words that could be used as personality descriptors for likability and subsequently learned them…

Contextual facilitation appears to depend upon the mode of analysis of the prime. If the prime is analyzed as a meaningful unit, facilitation occurs. However, if it is subjected to a more discrete, letter-by-letter analysis, the priming effect vanishes. (Author/CP)

An earlier study showed that responses are remembered better when subjects produce them from cues, than when subjects read cue-response pairs. The decided memory advantage for generated targets relative to read ones is known as the generation effect. The present research is designed to study the generation effect for cues, following a…

Two experiments investigated the effects of preceding sentence context on the naming times of sentence completion words in third-grade children and college students. In the first study subjects were shown incomplete sentences with four types of target words: best completions; semantically and syntactically appropriate, but less likely completions;…

These experiments focus upon two assumptions of the levels of processing formulation: that context provides exclusive control over the qualitative nature of encoding, and that amount recalled is determined both by cue-trace compatibility and by depth. The results cast doubt upon the validity of each assumption. (Author/MH)