This report describes seven basic experiments designed to further elucidate the nature and function of two types of organization imposed by subjects in a free-recall type of memory task. The experiments involved verbal stimulus materials and employed college students as subjects. The two types of organization investigated were category clustering,…

Performance changes during the course of single-trial free recall were investigated in five experiments. (Author/RM)

This study tested predictions from Clark and Haviland's formalization of what people do when integrating information. Subjects were presented with simple sentences issued from a set of complex ideas, and asked to reconstruct the complete ideas. Results support predictions based on a recoding strategy formalized by Clark and Haviland. (CHK)

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the relative efficiency of verbal and visual adjunct aids for concrete and abstract prose learning. For the abstract passage, verbal aids worked best and visual aids were somewhat disruptive. The concrete passage did not demonstrate the equivalency for two types of aids. (Author/PN)

The applicability of Piaget's cognitive processes of assimilation and accommodation to the learning of verbal nonsense syllables (ten low association value consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams) was tested experimentally. Twenty-two undergraduates (ten female and 12 male) at the University of Michigan served as subjects. It was hypothesized that…

The role of imagery is assessed in verbal concept identification and evidence is found that some concepts can be coded as images. (Author/AM)

To develop a coherent description of the knowledge and processes involved in skillful word recognition, a study was devised in which 16 adults participated in four related experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords and to discover basic differences in…

The primary purpose for conducting the present experiment was to assess the effects of an associative-attribute--for example, stimulus meaningfulness (m) on the learning rates of different age group children. An attempt was also made to assess the effects of age and m on a measure of subjective organization. This research consisted of two studies:…

Kindergarten and first-grade children listened to a narrative passage under one of five experimental conditions. Prelearning imagery instructions did not facilitate subsequent recall of story information. Similarly intermittently provided pictures did not produce recall gains for unpictured story information, but had a positive effect on recall of…

The hypothesis that reading difficulty of learning disabled (LD) children is attributable to deficiencies in verbal encoding was investigated with 60 LD and normal children (mean CA=9.1, mean IQ=103.5). Ss were compared on recall of a serial short-term memory task after pre-training of named and unnamed stimulus conditions. Data suggested that…

This study was designed to determine whether adults' memory for pictorial and word stimuli might be differentially affected by age. Twenty female secretaries, median age 22.1, and 20 female members of a senior citizens' center, median age 69.4, were asked to learn lists of pictorial and word stimuli under free recall conditions. Eight trials were…

Examined relationships among working memory, memory span, and reading skills in children and adults. Found that working memory and short-term memory skills develop through adolescence, but working memory skills show declines in adulthood. Age-related declines in memory appear to be related to the task's processing demands, which may affect the…

Research on learning and conditioning suggests that verbal response modification does not occur in the absence of the subject's ability to define verbally (1) the response-reinforcement relationships and (2) his intention to change his behavior in the direction of reinforcement. This seems to be true for operant conditioning of verbal behavior,…