The hypothesis that thematic prompts facilitate learning by furnishing mediators was investigated in three experiments, two of which produced enhanced learning. (CK)

The purpose of this study was to test associative skills by means of a paired-associate task with varied mediational instructions. Subjects were 84 first grade ghetto children, 25% of whom were from Spanish-speaking homes; virtually all the other subjects were black. The 3 x 2 x 4 factorial design included: three mediation sets (imagery,…

It sometimes happens that one is unable to recall a word or name that he feels he knows very well. This state of frustrated recall is referred to as a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience. Two experiments were devised to compare the ability of a weak trace and a decoding-failure model to predict the conditions under which TOT reports would be most…

Seven mediational strategies for use in verbal associative learning have been discovered. They range from the simple to the intermediate to the complex. The subjects of this study were 173 fifth graders, who were administered a paired-associate (PA) task and asked to identify the strategies they used. On the basis of this data, they were then…

People sometimes forget a name or a word, and are plagued by the feeling that the sought-for word is somewhere in memory but not immediately available. The frequent description of this tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon as subthreshold memory traces is challenged by data showing that TOT genesis and TOT recovery are distinct processes. In a verbal…