Three experiments examined effects of age and task interruption on children's prospective memory (PM), remembering to carry out a future task. Age explained a small portion of variance in performance. Children who did not have to interrupt their ongoing activity to complete the PM tasks performed significantly better than children who had to…

Examined effects of age and degree of learning on children's susceptibility to retroactive interference. Found that children who participated repeatedly in target game recognized more information from that game than children who participated once. Both 4- and 7-year-olds were susceptible to retroactive interference; susceptibility was not affected…

The aims of this study were (1) to assess the relative effectiveness of verbal and visual elaboration prompts and question-answering prompts on children's incidental memory, and (2) to determine whether performance improvement associated with pictorial elaboration could be augmented by either verbal elaboration or question-answering procedures.…

Three studies investigated the role of 8- and 10-year-olds' and adults' metacognitive monitoring and control processes for unbiased event recall tasks and suggestibility. Findings suggested strong tendencies to overestimate confidence regardless of age and question format. Children did not lack principal metacognitive competencies when questions…

Compared the power of two memory tasks to predict performance of 7- and 8-year-olds' on 2 phonological awareness measures. Found that the sound categorization had higher working memory demands than the phoneme deletion task. Working memory predicted independent variance only for sound categorization. Short-term memory did not account for…

In order to determine whether non-Western children would show a memory deficit for contextually organized spatial ability, the performances of 30 Mayan and 30 American nine-year-olds on reconstruction of an organized three-dimensional miniature scene were examined. (MP)

Examined whether age-related working memory deficits in learning disabled (LD) readers across four age groups (7, 10, 13, and 20) reflected retrieval efficiency or storage capacity problems. Found that LD readers' working memory performance was inferior to skilled readers' on verbal and visual-spatial working memory tasks across all ages.…

Two studies examined efficacy of context reinstatement in enhancing 5- to 7-year olds' recall. Results showed that children exposed to a context reminder 24 hours before the six-month interview and children interviewed in the event context did not differ but reported significantly more information than children in standard interview. (Author/KB)

This study compared 3- and 5-year-olds' reports of a true or false play interaction following repeated interviews. Findings indicated age-related improvements in performance. Three-year-olds questioned repeatedly about a false event made more errors in response to specific questions than their age-mates questioned about false details of a true…

Sentences were presented to adolescents with and without mental retardation, and their memory for the object nouns of the sentences was then tested under various conditions. Results indicate that differences in sentence processing between individuals with and without mental retardation may be a result of differences in generating integrated…

Five experiments compared metamemory abilities in 6- to 9-year olds with autism, mentally retarded children, and normal controls. Found that children with autism were not impaired on any of the metamemory tasks, although they were less likely than controls to make spontaneous use of memory strategies involving other people. Unexpectedly few…

Three studies involved kindergartners in a categorization task with an adult in collaborative and noncollaborative conditions; tested subjects on memory of who had performed which actions; and asked them to recategorize items independently. Results suggested that one process contributing to children's internalization of knowledge may involve…

This research study evaluated the effects of memory demand on sustained attention, by varying the time interval between the presentations of stimuli in a cognitive vigilance task. Sixteen retarded and 16 nonretarded adult observers performed four 60-minute visual vigilance tasks in which single digits were presented sequentially and successively…

Two studies investigated whether language-specific patterns encoding manner and direction of motion in English and Greek affect adult and child speakers' performance on nonlinguistic motion tasks and linguistic descriptions of these motion events. Although the two linguistic groups differed in linguistic preferences, nonlinguistic task performance…

Absolute judgment may be characterized as a special case of paired-associate learning in which the stimuli and responses are ordered, and responses are assigned to stimuli in serial order. (Authors)