SEVENTY-FIVE FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS PARTICIPATED IN A STUDY WHICH INVESTIGATED THE EFFECT OF GROUP PRESSURE ON THE RETENTION OF PREVIOUSLY LEARNED VERBAL MATERIAL IN A CONTROLLED LABORATORY SETTING. THE SUBJECTS WERE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED TO FIVE SITUATIONS, 15 TO A GROUP, AND WENT THROUGH 4 STEPS IN THE EXPERIMENT -- (1) ORIGINAL LEARNING, (2)…

A theoretical explanation of the phenomenon of recognition failure and a presentation of seven experiments investigating performance. Recognition failure is reduced when a more stringent recognition criterion is used, essentially eliminated when the proper access test is used and significantly reduced when variability in recognition performance is…

The purpose of these studies was to test a theory of associative context (defined as the association between two words in a pair) on recognition memory. The theory states that culturally associated words in a pair and nonassociated words in a pair differ after a single study trial in terms of their frequency representation in memory. Two…

Retrieval dynamics in recognition memory for paired-associates learned by rote repetition or visual imagery mnemonics are studied with Reed's response signal method. The use of visual imagery resulted in higher asymptotic accuracy as expected, but somewhat slower retrieval dynamics initially. (Author/RM)

Four experiments examined priming between newly learned paired associates through two procedures, lexical decision and item recognition. Results argue against a functional separation of the semantic and episodic memory systems. (Author/AM)

To investigate organizational strategies of educable mentally retarded (EMR) and normal boys, the performance of 30 normal boys (mean IQ 105.1) and 30 EMR boys (mean IQ 69.9), ages 7-12 years, was compared on various free recall learning tasks. Three measures of input organization employed were category clustering, associative clustering, and…

The research reported here was directed at two distinct but related problems: (1) the assumption of bipolarity underlying standard semantic differential scales, and (2) the demonstration of the similarities between D-4 (the square root of the sum of squares of the difference between each word's mean rating and 4.00 on a number of scales) as a…

To obtain an a priori estimate of natural language mediators (NLM's) 320 pairs of words with the consonant-vowel-consonant-pattern (CVC's) were broken into four series of 90 pairs and presented to 240 male and female undergraduates. Pairs were shown for 15 seconds while the subjects wrote down any associative device or NLM they could generate that…

The effect of presentation time on learning under varying mediation instructions demonstrated a time-dependent difference in the facilitating effect of imagery generation or sentence generation instructions. Subjects were junior high school students working in a paired associate task with concrete nouns. Both cognitive strategies were more…

Eighty sixth-grade subjects, split into five independent groups, learned two PA lists of 12 noun pairs each. Two groups performed under traditional transfer conditions with lists conforming to a negative transfer paradigm, A-B, A-C, or to a reference paradigm A-B, C-D. Two other groups learned the same lists under a syntactic PA method where the…

Eight experiments studied the following aspects of associative strategies in learning: classification; verbalization at three developmental levels; verbalization by normal and educable children; facilitation of associative learning among educable retardates; effectiveness of familiarization and differentiation training on the successful employment…

Three experiments tested whether qualitative differences in processing of verbal materials result from congenital hearing impairment. Subjects were children with reading levels equivalent to grades 4 to 6. Experiment 1 used repeated measurements with two modes of response and two kinds of cues; experiment 2 used acoustic similarity to produce…

The facilitation observed when paired-associates (PA) are presented or generated in a meaningful string is a phenomenon that is well-documented, and raises a number of developmental issues. The principal objective of the current research was to examine the relationship between performance on an auditory PA task and the linguistic components of…