Processing fluency--the experienced ease with which a mental operation is performed--has attracted little attention in educational psychology, despite its relevance. The present article reviews and integrates empirical evidence on processing fluency that is relevant to school education. Fluency is important, for instance, in learning,…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

Metacognition is one of the promising contemporary research fields in psychology and education. The concept has been introduced to describe and explain how people gain control over their learning and thinking, particularly in the case of cognitive failures and difficulties they meet when dealing with information processing and problem solving…

We examined whether individual differences in working memory influence the facility with which individuals learn new categories. Participants learned two different types of category structures: "rule-based" and "information-integration." Successful learning of the former category structure is thought to be based on explicit…

A cognitive model of human learning with understanding is introduced. Empirical research supporting the model, which is called the generative model, is summarized. The model is used to suggest a way to integrate some of the research in cognitive development, human learning, human abilities, information processing, and aptitude-treatment…

Control of the mechanisms of memory may eventually come to pass, thanks to ingenious new research with goldfish and rats. (Editor)

The intensity of information processing engendered in different phases of standard memory tasks was examined in six experiments. Processing intensity was conceptualized as system capacity consumed, and was measured via a divided-attention procedure in which subjects performed a memory task and a simple reaction-time (RT) task concurrently. The…

The present research represents an initial attempt to compare the results obtained using artificial information with results obtained in a typical semantic memory experiment. (Editor)

Presents a model of information processing that demonstrates how to facilitate knowledge acquisition. Various instructional strategies designed to reduce the effect of impositions are described, such as use of novelty, mystery, and questioning techniques; reducing complexity of instructional messages; and the automaticity of secondary skills. (JKP)

When subjects learned paired associates that, on the study trials, consisted of a stimulus (cue) and its correct (target) response plus two other (distractor) responses from within the list, the presence of the distractor items interfered with learning, especially when overtly pronounced as opposed to silently studied. (Editor)

Article attempted to show that new findings are emerging that may bring the study of probability learning closer to the mainstream of research on human memory and information processing. (Author/RK)

Looks at the processes by which information from individual input events combines to form a mentally represented linear order. (Author/RK)