Research has suggested that memory performance may be related to the extent of stimulus processing during acquisition. To examine processing efficiency and processing deficiency differences between younger and older adults, four studies were conducted. In the first study, young and old adults rated word lists, manipulated for generation specific…

The incidental memory of young children was tested for words or words plus pictures that were initially presented under orienting conditions. These conditions required responses to acoustic or semantic qualities of the stimuli and an affirmative or negative response to the orienting questions. (PCB)

Study was designed to investigate the effects of color cues and of subject-employed strategies in the development of selective attention in a short-term memory task. (Authors)

Three experiments with 164 individuals between 4 and 80 years old examined age-related changes in explicit memory for three perceptual features: item identity, color, and location. Findings indicated that performance on explicit memory tests was not a consistent inverted U-shaped function of age across various features, but depended on the…

Performance on tasks of memory and of attention was consistently interrelated for nonlearning disabled children and less consistently so for learning disabled subjects. Hyperactivity was also related to poorer performance on the cognitive measures. (Author/DB)

Among elementary, junior high, and college students, intelligent retrieval methods for recalling 20 letters of the alphabet consisted either of mentally proceeding through the alphabet from the onset and writing down each previously written letter as encountered and recognized, or else first rote recalling some letters and then switching to the…

An incidental memory paradigm was used to study involuntary encoding processes and voluntary retrieval strategies in children's memory. Subjects were 16 preschool children and 16 kindergarten children. (Author/MP)

Tests second- and sixth-grade students' incidental memory for words under acoustic- and semantic-processing conditions. The findings were predicted by an associative-processing account of incidental memory previously advanced by Ghatala (1981) and indicate that both knowledge-base development and processing activity determine children's incidental…

Memory of incidentally learned material was investigated across three developmental levels in immediate and delay conditions. Incidental learning increased with age with or without specific instructions, suggesting that previously reported divergent developmental trends may not be the result of the type of paradigm. (Author.PN)

First, third, and eighth graders performed four different orienting activities to different words. Under an incidental learning paradigm, the children's recognition was tested after the orienting activity. Age differences in recognition were absent, and the effect of the orienting activity responses on recognition supported depth of processing…

Three experiments with preschoolers tested the independence of the current state buffer from working memory. Findings indicated that when a teddy bear was an object put away with other toys, only half the preschoolers remembered its location despite explicit instructions. When the teddy was a character interacting with children, all remembered its…

To examine selective memorization in a scene context in which the expectancy of items was manipulated, preschool children, young adults, and older adults viewed a series of familiar scenes and were asked to remember one item from each. Results for children contrasted with the typical result of selective memorization research. (Author/RH)

The differences in performance on a variety of cognitive measures were studied in 67 learning disabled (LD) and normal elementary school children. Younger and older Ss were administered tests of conceptual sorting, central and incidental learning, and selective attention. Teacher ratings of classroom hyperactive behavior were also examined. LD Ss…

This study investigated the effects of distractors on children's task-relevant (central) and task-irrelevant (incidental) recall on a short term visual memory task involving pictures of familiar animals and household articles. The effect of mode of distractor (auditory or visual) and the effect of developmental level were also studied. Subjects…