The literature of antonymy, though disjointed and inconclusive, has found that opposition is important to development, learning, psychological health, and creativity. To investigate the role of dialectics in cognitive processes and human learning, four empirical studies were undertaken. In study one, to investigate the dialectic process in…

Two conflicting hypotheses were investigated in this study. The first is based on an interference theory of forgetting and assumes that forgetting is largely a function of proactive interference, i.e., a result of interference by previously learned material. The second is based on the improvement of memory due to basic mechanisms that may operate…

Ninety-nine preoperational stage children learned 24 pictorial paired-associates at one of three levels of concreteness: low detail line drawings, high detail line drawings, high detail line drawings with a verbal prompt. Within each of these groups, one-third of the subjects received either visual attentional training, no training, or were…

This study examined the effects on long-term retention of variations in intensity and of temporal parameters of arousal following a single learning trial in a paired-associate task. The subjects were 56 female university students. Intensity of arousal was manipulated by using two levels of white noise--75 decibels and 90 decibels sound pressure…

It was hypothesized that the use of fading in response items of stimulus-response pairs constructed to simulate learning of a foreign language vocabulary would result in fewer errors than would the use of regular flash cards used in typical trial-and-error fashion. Subjects were college women volunteers randomly assigned to one of two experimental…

This investigation examined the effects of mediation and Intelligence Quotient (IQ) scores on conceptual learning for black college students. It was predicted that higher IQ scoring subjects would not outperform lower IQ scoring subjects under nonmediated learning conditions but would significantly outperform lower IQ scoring subjects under…

Individual differences in fourth grade students' abilities to profit from experimenter-provided picture adjunct aids on prose recall tasks were examined. It was hypothesized that poor paired associate learners would benefit from picture adjunct aids to a greater extent than good paired associate learners. A secondary aim was to assess the effects…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of elaborated presentation on noun-pair retention. A 2 x 2 factorial design was used with aural-verbal presentation (standard versus elaborated) and visual-pictorial presentation (standard versus elaborated). Subjects for one experiment were 64 second-grade children from a Mexican-American…

This study investigated developmental differences in the use of the common features abstraction strategy and the exemplar learning strategy for concept acquisition. Subjects were 30 second graders and 30 fifth graders. The concepts to be learned were two categories of artificial animals which differed on five dimensions. Each dimension had three…

A study-recall paired-associates (PA) learning task was administered to 40 trainable mentally retarded children (6-14 years old) under one of four instructional modeling conditions: imagery, verbal mediation, imagery and verbal mediation, or control. On half of the PA learning study trials, the children were provided with modeled mediating…

The keyword method, originally developed as an instructional technique in foreign language acquisition, was tested for its application in other school learning tasks and as a self-initiated study strategy. Two classes containing a total of 40 eighth grade students served as the experimental and control groups. The tasks were learning to pair…