Various aspects of iconic memory have been studied in the past. Two tachistoscopic experiments were conducted to examine how legibility of a stimulus affects a subject's ability to recall brief visual presentation. The studies used letter arrays set in four different typefaces (Helvetica, Cooper Black Outline, Electronic, Old English). In the…

A series of studies was conducted to determine whether children's reasoning is capacity-limited and whether any such capacity, if it exists, is based on the working memory system. An N-term series (transitive inference) was used as the primary task in an interference paradigm. A concurrent short-term memory load was employed as the secondary task.…

Research has suggested that memory performance may be related to the extent of stimulus processing during acquisition. To examine processing efficiency and processing deficiency differences between younger and older adults, four studies were conducted. In the first study, young and old adults rated word lists, manipulated for generation specific…

The "transitive-chain" theory of syllogistic reasoning proposes that information about set relations is presented in memory by pairs of informational components and that information about set relations is integrated by applying a small set of rules to transitive chains that are found by rearranging informational components stored in…

Sixty four college students participated in a study which sought to validate a set of predictions about story memory, derived from a story-grammar approach to comprehension. The grammar describes the higher-order structures regulating the organization and retrieval of incoming story information. These structures, defined by a basic set of rewrite…

Results are reported which show that the facilitating effect of recall on recognition is quite substantial. (AM)

Research supported in part by a grant from the University Research Board, University of Illinois, and in part by Grant OEG-1-070028-5239 from the U.S. Office of Education, Bureau of Research.

Some of the issues associated with the lack of a precisely stated theory of memory organization are considered. The first section provides an overview of the concept of organization. Emphasis is on problems associated with the definition of organization, especially the distinction between organization as a process and as the product of a process.…

The levels of processing framework for understanding memory development has generated little empirical or theoretical work that furthers an understanding of the developmental memory system. Although empirical studies by those testing the levels of processing framework have demonstrated that mnemonic strategies employed by children are the critical…

The availability of semantic information in storage and the accessibility of that information for retrieval was studied with 40 retarded and 40 nonretarded adolescents. In Experiment I, Ss were required to retrieve information from semantic categories, as well as judge whether specific items were members of a given category. Results showed that…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of underlining on material which subjects were expected to learn. The subjects were 120 female undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology course. All subjects were presented with a booklet containing instructions on the first page followed by a passage of approximately 700…

This summary of research performed during the past five and one-half years and dealing with different attributes in memory functioning is organized around four attributes of memory: "Frequency Attribute: Verbal Discrimination" explores the development of the theory dealing with verbal discrimination tasks and lists several papers prepared during…

The effects of imagery on the recognition of subunits within a textual passage were investigated. College students first rated the subunits of a textual passage with respect to imagery. A different group of subjects was then given the passage to read, and these subjects were subsequently tested for recognition, either immediately or one week…

Subjects in an independent groups free learning experiment recalled list of low- or high-arousal words, matched for imagery and frequency and exposed randomly for 3 seconds and 9 seconds. Extrapolating neural consolidation theory to previous work on serial position effects led to the predictions that (1) arousal facilitates primacy; (2) arousal…

The usefulness of the method of memory judgments as a tool for studying human memory was explored in this research. The first experiments involved the nature of the information about when an event occurred, the spacing of repetitions of an event, and presentation modality of an event. Results suggested that time and spacing are represented in…