The multivariate effect of task sequence, memory support, and state anxiety was investigated using a nonverbal concept acquisition task. Ninety-five Indian college students were randomly assigned to four treatment conditions resulting from the task sequences of 1) easy-to-hard and 2) hard-to-easy and from memory support versus nonmemory support.…

Prompts in concept classification normally occur on the stimulus, while in memorization tasks prompts customarily are given on the response. Opposite results have been obtained for these two tasks with excessive prompting. This study used English-Russian word pairs to compare stimulus prompts (underlining the English word) with response prompts in…

The mediating role of learning in the relationship between repeated exposure and affect was explored and supported in three experiments involving a total of 229 undergraduate participants. It was found that both learning and affect measures behaved in essentially the same way as a function of exposure duration (experiments I and III), serial…

When one learns complex material, the important thing appears to be the ability to understand the material. Once understanding occurs, learning and remembering follow automatically. The conventional psychological literature says little about the processes involved in the learning of complex material--material that takes weeks, months, and even…

A series of pilot experiments were carried out to investigate the influence of stress induced by load and interference on the acquisition and retention of a path finding skill, and to investigate the relationship between two path finding strategies--retention of strings of instructions and understanding of global relationships--as components of…

This study examined the interactive relations among note-taking (NT), adjunct questions (AQ), and paying attention (PA) by students in lecture situations. The subject pool consisted of 154 students enrolled in basic psychology at the University of Massachusetts. Three aptitude tests were administered to all subjects. These tests measured (1) short…

A theory of learning and forgetting is proposed which uses an information processing (IP) model. The IP model views learning as a process of storing, retrieving, and outputing information from a permanent memory. The concept of information pattern is important to the IP model because the pattern of information determines how the information will…

A reconstructive approach to memory for connected discourse is contrasted with orientations that emphasize passive reproduction. Conditions under which reconstructive errors in recall should occur are specified. Most conventional experiments do not satisfy the conditions. In an experiment involving 360 college students, subjects were induced not…

Field-independent and field-dependent college students studied a 1525-word article under a preferred or nonpreferred study condition (read only, underline, or note taking). Half of the subjects reviewed the material prior to an examination and half did not. Results indicated that field-independent subjects who used a nonpreferred study technique…

The present experiment investigated memory attribute dominance in young children by measuring false recognition responses to associatively and acoustically related words. Second- and sixth-grade children, half of whom were high SES and half low SES, served as subjects. Following Underwood (1969), a shift from acoustic to associative memory…

In two experiments, college students who supplied the last words of sentences they read learned more than subjects who simply read whole sentences. This facilitation was observed even with a list of sentences which were almost always completed with the wrong words. However, proactive interference attributable to acquisition errors appeared on…

A study is reported describing an output-monitoring phenomenon in free recall and establishing that subjects have accurate knowledge concerning their previous output performance. Implications with respect to other known memory phenomena are discussed. (Author/RM)

Reports on two experiments which question the assumption that semantic processing is superior to nonsemantic processing, and which demonstrate that effective semantic elaboration cannot be equated with the quantity of semantically congrous information. (Author/AM)

Four possible mechanisms for short-term item recognition are distinguished. Manipulations of recency, particularly of negative probe items, provide critical tests. Two experiments were conducted using Sternberg's varied-set reaction time paradigm, coupled with procedures intended to minimize rehearsal and control the recency of probes and memory…

Begins by discussing a number of problems in applying a levels-of-processing approach to memory as proposed in the late 1960s and then revised in 1972 by Craik and Lockhart, suggests that some of the basic assumptions are false, and argues for information-processing models devised to study working memory and reading, which aim to explore the…