In 3 experiments, undergraduates used their own best method (control) or an "imposed" face-name mnemonic strategy to associate 18 caricatured faces, names, and additional facts. On all immediate tests (prompted by the faces), and on the delayed tests of Experiments 2a and 2b combined, mnemonic students statistically outperformed control students…

The authors conducted 2 experiments with children from a reservation community. In Experiment 1, 45 third-grade children were randomly assigned to the following reading strategies: (a) "reread," in which participants read each sentence of a story and then reread it; (b) "observe," in which participants read sentences and then observed an…

The authors examined an activity-based listening strategy with first- and third-grade children in mixed-grade dyads. On the basis of theories of cognitive development and previous research, the authors predicted the following: (a) children in an activity-based strategy would recall more story events compared with those in a repetition strategy and…

This article focuses on the early research domains investigated by Michael Pressley, along with the integrations and initiatives that were inspired by them. These research domains include verbal and imagery elaboration memory strategies, and developmental aspects of them; interrogative elaboration; pictorial strategies for language and literacy…

Previous research has demonstrated that requiring children to trace from memory the correct member of a pictorial discrimination pair markedly facilitates performance. The subjects for the first experiment in this study were 45 fifth grade students. The control group was given regular discrimination learning instructions. The image-trace group was…

The role of motor activity in children's formation of dynamic mental imagery was investigated in two experiments using a paired-associate recognition task. From the recognition data, it was inferred that (2) the child's ability to form dynamic images relating two objects undergoes its most rapid development between the ages of five and eight; and…

Instructions were given to first and sixth graders to use an imagery-retrieval strategy in recalling 18 paired associates. (SS)

This study consisted of two experiments. In the first experiment, 40 college students gave frequency ratings for concrete and abstract words which were equated on normative frequency. From the results it was concluded that abstract (low imagery) words, even though the two sets of words are of equal frequency. In the second experiment, different…

Experiments showed that in verbal discrimination learning imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the imagery structure was executed in the company of relevant motor activity. No difference between the two strategies was found in pictorial discrimination learning. (Author/BJG)

The viability of visual imagery as a prose-learning process was evaluated in two experiments with elementary school children in this study. In experiment one, two concrete ten-sentence passages were constructed. The attributes of two subclasses were contrasted in each passage (two kinds of monkeys in one passage, and two kinds of cars in the…

Three experiments were conducted to determine the effectiveness of verbal and imaginal rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. With verbal materials, imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the former strategy was defined in a manner conducive to effective…

Investigated whether there exists a stage of development at which "imagery-inducing motor activity" ceases to be facilitative relative to the effectiveness of alternative kinds of associative-learning strategies. (Author/SDH)

The purpose of this study was to determine whether motor activity, previously assumed necessary to induce visual imagery in young children's associative learning, actually has to be executed in order for children to generate images. The results of an experiment with 96 kindergartners clearly suggest not: in conditions where subjects simply planned…

Results lend partial support to the proposition that the effectiveness of a particular rehearsal strategy depends on the degree to which it provides a discriminative cue for the materials on hand: With homonym pairs, imagery constituted such a discriminative cue, while vocalization did not; with synonym pairs, the converse was true. (Authors/CB)

Findings were that imagery instructions for picture pairs were generally more facilitative than imagery instructions for word pairs, with children at this age exhibiting little variability in their capacity to utilize a visual imagery strategy when pictures comprised the learning materials. (Authors)