Fluency, the subjective experience of ease associated with information processing, has been shown to affect a host of judgments. Previous research has typically focused on specific factors that affect the use of a single, specific fluency source. In the present study we examine how cognitive mindsets, or processing modes, moderate fluency…

Although some theories suggest that anxious individuals selectively remember threatening stimuli, findings remain contradictory despite a considerable amount of research. A quantitative integration of 165 studies with 9,046 participants (clinical and nonclinical samples) examined whether a memory bias exists and which moderator variables influence…

THE EFFECTS OF FAMILIARITY ON THE PROCESSING OF STIMULUS AND MEMORIAL INFORMATION WERE INVESTIGATED IN TWO TASKS--ONE WHICH SUPPOSEDLY REQUIRED ONLY THE PERCEPTUAL RECOGNITION OF EACH STIMULUS WORD (E TASK) AND ONE WHICH REQUIRED A MEANINGFUL CATEGORIZATION OF EACH STIMULUS WORD (C TASK). FIFTY UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDERGRADUATES WHO WERE PAID…

This Commentary supports Gathercole's (2006) proposal on a double deficit in children with specific language impairment (SLI). The author suggests that these children have a limited phonological storage combined with a particular problem of processing novel speech stimuli. According to Gathercole, there are three areas of skill contributing to…

Study supported by a National Institute of Mental Health grant to New York University. (VM)

Three experiments investigated the nature of false recognition errors made after incidental learning that required acoustic or semantic analysis. (Editor)

Research supported by a grant from the Office of Naval Research. (DD)

The time course of the spread of activation in lexical memory was studied using naming latency as the measure of activation in a variable-duration priming paradigm. (Editor)

The effects of types of both memorized items and probes (digit, word, and dot pattern), using Sternberg's character-recognition procedure, were studied. Reaction time (RT) was a linear function of the set size of memorized items consistent with a serial search model. Response type (positive or negative) affected the encoding time (intercept of RT…

The extent to which children of two age levels use visual or name codes in recognizing similarities and differences between short words was studied. Subjects were presented with a word for .5, 1.0, or 1.5 seconds, followed immediately by a second word, and were instructed to press a key indicating whether or not the two words had the same name.…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with the following topics: advance organizers; a comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of behavioral objectives and sample tests; anaphoric nominal substitution and its relationship to reading…