George A. Miller's essay gives a clear account of information theory and demonstrates how the concept of limited channel capacity can be applied across sensory dimensions. Its major influence has been demonstrating that immediate memory span is relatively insensitive to the amount of information per item. (SLD)

Restates A. D. Baddeley's hypothesis about the limited capacity for information processing: an individual's limited capacity to handle information (including production and storage), although presumably never reached in actual performance, exercises a definable constraint on performance. (RL)

Many of the puzzles of absolute judgment raised by George A. Miller in 1956 remain puzzles today. Literature directed toward capacity limitations in absolute judgment tasks and in short-term memory is reviewed, and some models that attempt to elucidate the phenomena are discussed. (SLD)

Presentation and criticism of pertinent work, plus the authors' own model. (Text is in French.) (DB)

The memory model, based on information theory proposed by Moser (see SE 013 578), was used to compare the cognitive processing patterns of second and eighth grade Negro and Caucasian students in solving the "parallel circuits" problem. (Connecting two light bulbs and a dry cell so that when both bulbs light, one bulb can be unscrewed,…

Contends that redundancy increases information transmission and reception by (1) decreasing equivocation and error and (2) establishing memory traces and inhibiting forgetting. (PD)

An information-theory model of human memory was tested in thirteen experiments which involved children (six years and older) and graduate students. The subjects conducted science investigations in laboratory and non-laboratory settings, solved problems of electrical circuits, and participated in classroom science lessons. The tasks used involved…

A probabilistic model (see SE 013 578) describing information processing during the cognitive tasks of recall and problem solving was tested, refined, and developed by testing graduate students on a number of tasks which combined oral, written, and overt "input" and "output" modes in several ways. In a verbal chain one subject…

Two experiments explored how memory for new information is affected by awareness of parallels to pre-experimental knowledge. Results suggest that the benefit of prior knowledge derives from the more elaborate encodings that analogy promotes. (Author/AM)

This study tested the ability of two semantic-memory models, feature-comparison and network, to explain differences in information processing times. The feature-comparison model assumes that an item's meaning is held in semantic memory as a set of characteristic and defining features, while the network model assumes that semantic memory is…

The principal recent models of semantics, conceptual, and lexical memory are explicated and criticized. A description of long-term is developed in terms of these models. (Text is in French.) (DB)

Working from theories of text grammar and logic, the authors suggest and tentatively confirm several hypotheses concerning the role of micro- and macro-structures in comprehension and recall of texts. (Text is in French.) (DB)

Evidence from studies of memory for meaningful materials such as sentences and prose passages is reviewed in this paper with emphasis on its implications for the nature of the memory representation. It is argued that models of memory which involve the retrieval of stored copies of originally presented material cannot account for two crucial…

Reported is another study related to the Project on an Information Memory Model. This study involved using information theory to investigate the concepts of primacy and recency as they were exhibited by ninth-grade science students while processing a biological sorting problem and an immediate, abstract recall task. Two hundred randomly selected…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of age differences and differences in memory load on concept identification (CI) tasks of varying levels of complexity. Previous studies with young children found increasingly better performance on CI tasks with increasing age. This was in part due to the fact that older subjects categorize…