Performance on a wide variety of memory tasks can be hypothesized to be influenced by processes associated with controlling the contents of memory. In this project 328 adults ranging from 18 to 93 years of age performed six tasks (e.g., multiple trial recall with an interpolated interference list, directed forgetting, proactive interference, and…

Evoked potential studies have demonstrated that musicians have the ability to distinguish musical sounds preattentively and automatically at the temporal, spectral, and spatial levels in more detail. It is however not known whether there is a difference in the early processes of auditory data processing of musicians. The most emphasized and…

Delay of Gratification (DG) and Delay Discounting (DD) represent two indices of impulsive behavior often treated as though they represent equivalent or the same underlying processes. However, there are key differences between DG and DD procedures, and between certain research findings with each procedure, that suggest they are not equivalent. In…

To examine effects of input and learner characteristics on morphology acquisition, 60 adult English speakers learned to inflect masculine and feminine Russian nouns in nominative, dative, and genitive cases. By varying training vocabulary size (i.e., type variability), holding constant the number of learning trials, we tested whether learners…

The psychology of personality has always attempted to define the individual in relation to normative data. However, personality theory should be attempting to define individuals from an interactive measurement model, examining the individual in terms of his own subjective impressions about what he does, with a conception of what he does not do.…

Questions concerning individual differences in learning ability may be more precisely addressed in light of an agreed-upon taxonomy of learning skills. Existing taxonomies are reviewed, and their shortcomings are described. A taxonomy is then proposed based on a synthesis of current thought consisting of four dimensions: the forms of knowledge;…

Recent experiments have shown that people process information about themselves more efficiently than other kinds of information. To investigate individual differences in the processing of self-relevant information, subjects (N=41) rated the self- and other-applicability of 90 traits and completed nine standard personality scales. Several measures…

This report is the third in a series of research projects concerning abilities and performance processes, particularly in school mathematics. A theoretical scrutiny of traditional psychometric testing, cognitive processes, their interrelationships, and an empirical application of the theoretical considerations on the level of junior secondary…

Undergraduates (n=99) differing in spatial ability were tested on problems involving the mental rotation of familiar alphanumeric stimuli and unfamiliar stimuli drawn from the Primary Mental Abilities Space Test. Individual differences in spatial ability were associated with speed rather than accuracy of mental rotation processes. Ability…

This research addresses the actual goals and intentions from which students plan and organize their work in a course of study. Representations can either facilitate or hinder learning and problem solutions. Several salient aspects of adult students' representational systems and how they influenced university study were examined in two studies. The…

Two studies were conducted to clarify some problems in aptitude treatment interaction research, by concentrating on the macroprocesses in reading required by different instructional methods and the macroprocesses available to students. In the first experiment, three reading groups were used, the first receiving adjunct questions, the second also…

Two variables involved in attitude change provided the basis for this study, the cognitive complexity of the subject and the dimensions of stimulus materials. After a pretest, 165 interpersonal communication students were divided into two groups according to their cognitive complexity levels. The dimensions of the stimulus were presented on two…

Arguing that skilled reading is the result of the successful acquisition of a number of highly automatic component processes that operate together in an integrated manner, this paper describes a series of studies of good and poor high school readers representing three general domains of processing: decoding, analyzing and comprehending text, and…

Literature on cognition and learning in young adults is surveyed. First, an outline of a theory of the cognition-learning system is presented, reviewing the characteristics of each of the major components of the system. Particular attention is paid to the differences between young adults and other age groups in information processing skills.…