The aim of this study was to examine the associations of control and vividness of mental imagery on performance in several components of in-depth drawing in a sample of fine arts undergraduates. The sample consisted of 56 second-year undergraduates (44 women and 12 men, mean age = 21.18 years) from the Fine Arts Faculty of Vigo University,…

Examined the effects of emotionality of study tasks on face and word recognition in four studies. Results showed face recognition performance was best after an emotional nonself study task. Concluded that self-images are less effective mnemonic aids than the propositional self-concept. (WAS)

The delay retention effect was examined using a recent model of feedback for 154 undergraduates, testing the assumptions of the model and investigating the effects of different types of feedback on posttest performance. Implications of better performance after delayed feedback and the assumptions of the model are explored. (SLD)

The prediction that utilization of contextual information will be reduced by the presentation of secondary tasks requiring attention was studied. The importance of a limited-capacity operational memory for reading performance was discussed. (BJG)

Two studies investigated 320 college students' knowledge about the effectiveness of alternative memory strategies for different tasks and the relationship of this knowledge to strategy use and task performance. Results indicate that students did know the relative effectiveness of different strategies, supporting current models of metamemory. (SLD)

Concludes that recall of a second item of a pair when cued with the first was significantly influenced by both pair relationship and the processing task. (RB)

This paper provides experimental demonstration of remindings during learning and examines their effect on performance, as well as effects of practice and difficulty. Three experiments examining the occurrence, effects, and conditions of remindings are presented, and the implications for theories of cognitive skill learning are discussed.…

In separate research studies, students who were given a choice of learning materials or who had control over aversive noise, demonstrated higher motivation and better task performance. To investigate the additive effects of choice and control on perception of control, 80 male and female college students participated in a 2 (choice vs. no-choice) X…

Two longitudinal studies of expert-level cognitive skills and their acquisition are reported. The first study focused on the skill of an otherwise normal subject who increased his digit-span to over 100 digits with 4.5 years of practice using the mnemonic system developed by W. G. Chase and K. A. Ericsson. The second study followed two college…

The present study assessed the effects that the density of an array has on two aspects of memory: the ability to recall a group of items and the ability to place these items in their original locations. First-graders, fourth-graders, and college students were asked to memorize 16 common objects presented in either a dense array or a spaced array.…

Three experiments were conducted to determine the effects of student-preferred incentives across instructional tasks that varied in length and relatedness to course content. The first study was done to determine the effects of the opportunity to earn points toward the course grade. There were no differences between incentive and no-incentive…

The water jug task model was extended to four variations of the Missionaries--Cannibals river-crossing problem. Different cover stories resulted in large differences in number of illegal moves, but no difference in number of legal moves to solution. The three-stage process model explains both legal and illegal moves. (Author/GDC)

Previous studies of the effect of age and modality on digit span task performance have yielded inconsistent results. To eliminate some of the methodological difficulties in prior research, 18 college students and 18 older adults were given the digit span task by means of three different modalities: (1) visual successive; (2) visual simultaneous;…

Five experiments investigated how completely and accurately adults remember the visual details of the common United States penny. Subjects had to draw a penny from unaided recall and select the correct representation of a penny. Performance was poor on all tasks. Implications for long-term memory models were discussed. (Author/RD)

Four experiments with 263 undergraduates and 57 seventh-graders examined the "testing phenomenon" in relation to students' memory for brief passages and labels for parts of flowers. The phenomenon, which involves the positive effects of previous testing on final test performance, appears to depend on several complete retrieval events. (TJH)