This paper presents a model for the theoretical understanding of communication with individuals with severe disabilities, called the "Context times Memory model." Issues discussed include a memory framework describing the structure of communicative knowledge; information processing mechanisms that make possible the patterns of everyday…

Fifteen adolescents with and 15 without mental retardation were compared on their tendency to show the representational momentum effect when viewing a stimulus array that implied motion. Participants with mental retardation showed the representational momentum effects as did the others, although the magnitude of the memory shift was smaller.…

Comments on the work of Arthur Jensen, specifically "The g Factor" (1998), which consolidates the psychometric, neurophysiological, behavior genetic, and comparative evidence for the existence and importance of a factor of general intelligence ("g"). Discusses Jensen's work on black/white differences in intelligence. (SLD)

Examined whether a sample of variability measures could be reduced to a smaller number of factors with 8 independent samples of second through fourth graders and adults. Found that a 2-factor model of strategy diversity and strategy change was supported for all samples. Strategy diversity positively related to children's recall; strategy change…

A study compared 16 adults with Asperger syndrome and 10 controls in remember versus know recognition memory. Both groups showed superior recognition for low-frequency compared with high-frequency words. Recognition in the individuals with Asperger syndrome was associated with less remembering and more knowing than in the control group. (Contains…

A "hippocampal amnesiac" (H.M.) and memory-normal controls of similar age, background, intelligence, and education read novel sentences aloud in tasks where fast and accurate reading was or was not the primary goal. H.M produced more misreadings than normal and cerebellar controls, usually without self-correction. Results support a theoretical…

Ten cerebellar patients were compared to 10 control subjects on a verbal working memory task in which the phonological similarity of the words to be remembered and their modality of presentation were manipulated. Cerebellar patients demonstrated a reduction of the phonological similarity effect relative to controls. Further, this reduction did not…

There are several studies showing that working memory and intelligence are strongly related. However, working memory tasks require simultaneous processing and storage, so the causes of their relationship with intelligence are currently a matter of discussion. The present study examined the simultaneous relationships among short-term memory (STM),…

Dynamic spatial ability is one's ability to estimate when a moving object will reach a destination, or one's skill in making time-to-contact (TTC) judgments. In 2 studies, we investigated the nature of dynamic spatial ability and its role in psychomotor (PM) task performance. In the first study, 405 basic military trainees were given both spatial…

The prefrontal cortex modulates executive control processes and structurally matures throughout adolescence. Consistent with these events, prefrontal functions that demand high levels of executive control may mature later than those that require working memory but decreased control. To test this hypothesis, adolescents (9 to 20 years old)…

Working memory capacity has been suggested as a factor that is involved in long-term memory retrieval, particularly when that retrieval involves a need to overcome some sort of interference (Bunting, Conway, & Heitz, 2004; Cantor & Engle, 1993). Previous work has suggested that working memory is related to the acquisition of information during…

Participants (6- and 7-year-olds, "N" = 130) participated in classroom activities four times. Children were interviewed about the final occurrence (target event) either 1 week or 4 weeks later, during which half of the event items were described inaccurately. Half of these suggestions were consistent with the theme of the detail across…

In experimental time estimation research, it has consistently been found that the more a person is engaged in some kind of demanding cognitive activity within a given period of time, the more experienced duration of this time interval decreases. However, the role of individual differences has been largely ignored in this field of research. In a…

The authors argue that nonword repetition priming in lexical decision is the net result of 2 opposing processes. First, repeating nonwords in the lexical decision task results in the storage of a memory trace containing the interpretation that the letter string is a nonword; retrieval of this trace leads to an increase in performance for repeated…

A novel effect is reported in which serial recall of visual digits was disrupted to a greater degree by the presence of the same set of digits presented as an irrelevant auditory sequence than by the presence of irrelevant auditory consonants, but only when the order of the irrelevant digits was incongruent with that of the to-be-remembered digits…