As speakers interact, they add references to their common ground, which they can then reuse to facilitate listener comprehension. However, all references are not equally likely to be reused. The purpose of this study was to shed light on how the speakers' conceptualizations of the referents under discussion affect reuse (along with a generation…

The notion of forgetting implies that important information once learned and accessible can no longer be retrieved and remembered. Although college students do not need to recall everything, they frequently have some trouble remembering what they need to know when taking quizzes and examinations (exams), and when giving oral presentations. This…

How do people select among different strategies to accomplish a given task? Across disciplines, the strategy selection problem represents a major challenge. We propose a quantitative model that predicts how selection emerges through the interplay among strategies, cognitive capacities, and the environment. This interplay carves out for each…

This study investigated whether good novice problem solvers have their knowledge arranged around problem types to a greater extent than poor problem solvers have. Twelve problem types (see appendix) were distinguished according to underlying physics principles and 65 knowledge elements were printed on cards for university students to sort.…

This article presents a new method of inferring students' cognitive structures and their development. A modification of Reitman and Rueter's "ordered tree technique," the method generates a structure that displays important relationships assumed to be in a student's memory about concepts taken from a specific field of study. (Author/LMO)

Evidence points to a pervasive tendency for persons to behave to maintain their existing cognitive structures. One strategy by which this self-verification is made more probable involves information processing. Through attention, encoding and retrieval, and the interpretation of events, persons process information so that self-confirmatory…

Two experiments were conducted to test competing explanations of the levels effect in memory for text. In both experiments subjects (college students) read paragraphs in which the height of target propositions was held constant while the amount of target elaboration differed across versions of the paragraphs. (Author/LMO)

Two experiments look at factors influencing the ways children construct an abstract representation of story structure that contains the characteristics described by story grammars. (RWB)