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…

A total of 47 6-year-old children listened to stories after which they either constructed pictorial representations of those stories from a set of backgrounds and cut-out figures and objects, or they spent equivalent time classifying geometric figures. The pictorial elaboration task inhibited recall of the stories. This contrasts with results…

The present study was conducted to demonstrate the power of imagery instructional sets to improve the recall of units more complex than in the traditional paired associate (P-A) paradigm and to evaluate imagery as a memory organizer. Forty-eight sixth grade children were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, defined by the…

Beginning with a preconceived bias that "real" (i.e. nonartifactual) age differences in transfer and retroaction do exist, the author feels that the available literature permits no clear conclusions relating the process of aging and transfer mechanisms, or aging and retroaction. Research to date is viewed as assuming that "interference" manifests…

The study investigated the task performance of cerebral palsied children under conditions of reduced auditory input and under normal auditory conditions. A non-cerebral palsied group was studied in a similar manner. Results indicated that cerebral palsied children showed some positive change in performance, under conditions of reduced auditory…

This study was designed to test the effects of message summaries on the recall of main points of an informative message. Two different types of summary techniques, a mnemonic and a traditional type, were identified and compared with each other and with a third treatment involving no summaries. One hundred and eleven volunteer subjects were…

The purpose of this study was to determine if being next-in-line to perform would render strong effects on the student's storage and retrieval of information. The subjects were 45 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory educational psychology course. Fifteen subjects were arranged in a large circle and were told that they were going to…

This discussion of transitive inferences (if A greater than B & B greater than C, then A greater thean C) emphasizes an information processing analysis of logical thought. The two basic factors considered in such an analysis are (1) the task environment, including its structure, demands, decisions required, and information given; and (2) the…

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…

This research project investigated some of the characteristics of primary and secondary memory. In the primary research, subjects were given a list of words followed by an interpolated task. The data of interest were the recall for terminal items in the list. Using this procedure, the researchers have demonstrated negative recency in initial…

This paper, presented at the 1973 meeting of the American Education Research Association, discusses some of the studies conducted in the area of learning from prose. The first study dealt with pooling independent sentences into groups of related sentences and preparing passages by stringing these sentences together. College students then read one…

The primary object of this research proposal is to delineate the area of general learning abilities. It differentiates between abilities and skills by defining ability as a general trait which can be inferred from observation of responses consistent across tasks and skill as a proficiency on a specific task or on a limited group of tasks. A review…

The study paired-associate (PA) learning via the anticipation (ANT) and study-test (ST) procedures across second, third, fourth and fifth grades. Specifically, age differences in the rate of learning and examining PA learning according to the stage analyses were examined. Retention was also of interest: however, a ceiling effect negated the…

In two experiments, visual and auditory memory were tested for good and for poor readers from the upper elementary grades. Under experimenter-blind conditions, no reading group differences existed for single-mode presentation in recognition frequency or recognition latency. With a multimodal presentation, latencies for poor readers were similar to…

In two experiments, subjects verified 15 bird and 15 tool names on a list coming under either the category bird/tool (second hierarchical level [L2] of verification) or the category animate/inanimate (fourth hierarchical level [L4] verification). Subjects recalled fewer words following the L4 than the L2 verification. (Author/RM)