This article revisits Paas and Van Merrienboer's (1993) measure of instructional efficiency, which can be applied by educational researchers to compare the effects of different instructional conditions on learning. This measure relied on performance and mental effort on the test, and as such gave an indication of the quality of learning outcomes.…

Two experiments examined the effects of a change in a reinforcing stimulus's color on memory for an operant response in three- to four-month-old infants. (Author/RH)

Infants who cried in response to a reward shift evidenced no retention of the contingency 1 week later but did have excellent retention at one day. Reactivation treatment alleviated forgetting at three weeks. Results indicate that crying in response to violation of a reward-expectation habit functions as an amnesic agent to produce accelerated…

Challenges the notion that long-term memory retrieval efficiency is a potential source of individual and developmental differences in cognitive functioning. Fourth-grade, eighth-grade, and college-aged subjects participated in a task using the Posner letter matching paradigm and were assessed with tests of verbal and spatial ability. (Author/CB)

A laboratory procedure was developed for assessing imitation in the second year of life. Results demonstrate that 14- and 24-month-olds can imitate a simple action with an unfamiliar object, both immediately and after a 24-hour delay. Implications for research design and theory of infant memory are discussed. (RH)

Tested the hypothesis that fourth-graders have a greater tendency than first-graders to represent transformations as ordered series of beginning, middle, and end states. Predominantly constructed states of fourth-graders were components of continuous movements or transformations, whereas those of first-graders related to the experimenters' on the…

Infants were tested in three studies of the acquisition and long-term retention of category-specific information. Results document retention of category-specific information after intervals of two weeks. (PCB)

Assessed the effect of the amount of physical detail in pictures on the picture recognition memory of 7- and 9-year-olds, young adults, and adults over 68. For each age group, recognition accuracy was significantly higher for pictures presented in the simple rather than the complex form. (PCB)

A study that has uncovered robust memories among former students for material learned in a college course after as long as 11 years is discussed. This is in contrast to the widespread conviction that the passing of years wipes away most recollections of concepts and facts learned in school. (KR)

Examines the factors influencing the use of a plan by four- and five-year-old children to judge the relative number of two sets by one-to-one correspodence. Results suggest that most children have one-to-one plans in long-term memory by age four. (Author/RWB)

Reports on a longitudinal study of retention of science learning carried out in Israel (from grade 8 to grade 10, ages 13-16). Findings show that retention of meaningful school materials does exist from one course to another, even over relatively extended materials. (JN)

The influence of negative affect on the retrieval of information from memory during infancy was investigated in two studies through the use of an operant conditioning paradigm. The procedure used, known as "mobile conjugate reinforcement," involves a free operant task in which an infant is reinforced for footkicking by the movement of an…

Eight-, eleven-, and nineteen-year-olds' memory for spatial locations over an extended time period was assessed. Study suggested that adults remember spatial location information better than children over time because adults code location information in more organized representations and use better retrieval cues. (RWB)

Research on the cognitive processes used in semantic priming has shown that the processing of a given stimulus is speeded by prior processing of a related stimulus as the result of automatic and/or effortful priming. To investigate the effect of age on semantic priming, two independent studies were conducted at Pomona College in California and at…

Auditory and visual memory span were examined with 13 Down Syndrome and 15 other trainable mentally retarded young adults. Although all subjects demonstrated relatively poor auditory memory span, Down Syndrome subjects were especially poor at long-term memory access for visual stimulus identification and short-term storage and processing of…