The literature of antonymy, though disjointed and inconclusive, has found that opposition is important to development, learning, psychological health, and creativity. To investigate the role of dialectics in cognitive processes and human learning, four empirical studies were undertaken. In study one, to investigate the dialectic process in…

This study was designed to determine whether subjects who received one of three treatments of color cues in an instructional program differed significantly on three learning tasks. Subjects were randomly selected from the kindergarten populations of two Michigan public schools and were assigned to one of three treatment groups. Eight letter-like…

The data from verbal learning studies have been partially instrumental in the development of the theory of extraversion-introversion (E-I) relative to levels of cortical arousal. In most of the studies relating E-I to verbal learning, the approach was to determine if there was an overall superiority for one of the personality groups. Differences…

Compared were the performances of 45 normal and 45 slow learners (all in junior high school) on a task of original and relearning of paired associate responses as a result of induced success or failure following each response. Ss were asked to pair stick figures with consonant trigrams and then told their performance was either correct or wrong…

Visual and auditory paired-associate learning tasks were presented to 125 fourth grade children (45 learning disabled, 39 border line learning disabled, and 41 nonlearning disabled). The visual task produced a greater number of correct responses than did the auditory task. There were no differences among groups on either task. Scores on the…

Two conflicting hypotheses were investigated in this study. The first is based on an interference theory of forgetting and assumes that forgetting is largely a function of proactive interference, i.e., a result of interference by previously learned material. The second is based on the improvement of memory due to basic mechanisms that may operate…

To test the hypothesis that a bidirectional or hierarchical relationship exists between self-efficacy and mnemonic self-concept, an investigation was made of the relationship between a task-independent learning strategy and self-efficacy for a variety of cognitive skills. A total of 60 second graders were pretested for self-efficacy on four…

This paper reports three experiments concerning methodological issues in studies on incidental learning performance which use verbal and nonverbal procedures and which appear to be hampered by differences in stimulus materials, learning opportunities, and dependent measures. The first study, using 128 children from grades 3, 5, 7, and 9, attempted…

Ninety-nine preoperational stage children learned 24 pictorial paired-associates at one of three levels of concreteness: low detail line drawings, high detail line drawings, high detail line drawings with a verbal prompt. Within each of these groups, one-third of the subjects received either visual attentional training, no training, or were…

This study examined the effects on long-term retention of variations in intensity and of temporal parameters of arousal following a single learning trial in a paired-associate task. The subjects were 56 female university students. Intensity of arousal was manipulated by using two levels of white noise--75 decibels and 90 decibels sound pressure…

The effects of five verbal elaboration conditions on the paired associate learning of 50 elementary-aged educable mentally retarded children were investigated. Four of the conditions, crossing functional and positional relations in familiar or unfamiliar events, were included in a two-factor design (type of relation x familiarity); the fifth…

Artificial symbol-word correspondence in a simple paired associate learning task were used to determine whether disabled readers have a general problem dealing with complex and/or irregular rule systems. The performance of 36 normal readers and 36 disabled readers in grades 4 through 7 was compared. Disabled readers had IQ scores of 87 or above…

It was hypothesized that the use of fading in response items of stimulus-response pairs constructed to simulate learning of a foreign language vocabulary would result in fewer errors than would the use of regular flash cards used in typical trial-and-error fashion. Subjects were college women volunteers randomly assigned to one of two experimental…

Research suggests that when subjects are given a rule as to how to translate auditory or verbal information into images, the images have many common characteristics with cognitive representations derived from visual perceptions. This experiment examined the process of cognitive integration and the similarities and differences between how imagined…

Recently, confirmatory factor analysis has been extended to the case of dichotomous data (e.g., Muthen, 1978). In this study, confirmatory factor analysis was applied to all-or-none recall data from a designed experiment. In the experiment, subjects read pairs of English nouns and then tried to recall the right hand member of the pair when…