In order to determine whether there are developmental differences in the handling of the modality attribute 32 children from each of grades two and six and 32 college students were presented with a video-taped mixed-modality list of 32 first grade words. Subjects were asked to recall the words, to identify the presentation modality of each word on…

The impact of age effects on nonverbal memory for auditory or tactual patterns has been largely neglected in research studies. The effects of age on nonverbal memory were investigated by comparing subjects (N=120), divided by age decades into six groups (N=20), through tests using visual, auditory, and tactual items which were resistant to verbal…

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory that predicts how units of information should be distributed in a sentence and how sentences should be related in a discourse. A binary topic-comment structure is assigned to each FSP sentence. For most English sentences, the topic is associated with the subject or the left-most noun phrase, and…

Mock juries of six females each listened to a tape-recording of facts in a courtroom trial. Twelve juries heard guilt-appearing facts, and twelve heard innocent-appearing facts. In half the juries hearing each type of trial, jurors heard the facts in the same (Homogeneous) order; in the remaining juries, each of the six jurors heard the facts in a…

The conference from which the papers in this book are derived addressed the following questions: How is knowledge organized? How does knowledge develop? How is knowledge retrieved and used? What instructional techniques promise to facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge? Separate chapters address types of knowledge and purposes of education;…

Individuals previously identified as language-bound (LB) and language-optional (LO) participated in a series of experiments to study verbal fluency. The two groups showed a striking similarity in the number of responses they produced for categories with constraints at various levels (word form, word content, sentence, interpretation). This…

This paper discusses research on age related aspects of children's processing and comprehension of the narrative content of family oriented television programs. In one study, the temporal integration necessary to make inferences about audiovisually presented information was examined in 254 second, fifth and eighth grade children. Subjects were…

Albert Michotte, known primarily for his research in perception, also carried out several experiments in logical memory (conceptual or intellectual memory). He was strongly influenced by Kulpe, feeling that the thought processes were autonomous, in contradiction to more traditional and elementary conceptions of mental activity. His experiments,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of organizational processes for both verbal and spatial stimulus materials within an information processing framework. Children in grades 2 and 4 and adults were tested for their ability to report letter strings reflecting various orders of approximation to English and various dot…

As part of a long term project relating individual differences in performance on paper and pencil tests of intellectual aptitude and achievement to differences observed in laboratory studies of cognition, data have been collected comparing test scores with simple choice reaction times. The three studies summarized here suggest that the…

This study was designed to determine whether adults' memory for pictorial and word stimuli might be differentially affected by age. Twenty female secretaries, median age 22.1, and 20 female members of a senior citizens' center, median age 69.4, were asked to learn lists of pictorial and word stimuli under free recall conditions. Eight trials were…

The author considers memory as being composed of four categories. The fourth category--metamemory--refers to the individual's knowledge and awareness of memory or of anything pertinent to information storage and retrieval. It is that aspect of memory that deals with the how and what of memory itself. The paper first presents a model of what could…

Number of stimulus items presented together (one, three or five) and instructions to organize were studied in a multitrial free recall experiment with 83 educable retarded adolescents. Results of individual sessions in which Ss were asked to recall 15 common words indicated that presentation of three stimuli together produced the highest…

This study investigated children's developmental differences in adopting a clustering strategy while studying items for later recall. The central focus was on developmental differences in the efficient use of study strategies, rather than clustering in recall per se. Twenty-four third- and fifth-graders and 12 college students were given a series…

This study investigates children's semantic integration of sentence information as a function of instructions (form or substance), test sentence form (verbatim or paraphrased from acquisition story sentences), and story content (spatial or general relationships). After 144 fifth-grade children were presented with twelve short acquisition stories,…