SEVENTY-FIVE FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS PARTICIPATED IN A STUDY WHICH INVESTIGATED THE EFFECT OF GROUP PRESSURE ON THE RETENTION OF PREVIOUSLY LEARNED VERBAL MATERIAL IN A CONTROLLED LABORATORY SETTING. THE SUBJECTS WERE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED TO FIVE SITUATIONS, 15 TO A GROUP, AND WENT THROUGH 4 STEPS IN THE EXPERIMENT -- (1) ORIGINAL LEARNING, (2)…

Evidence was found for an ability to monitor during learning the degree of retrievability of the to-be-learned material from memory at time of a subsequent test. Students were given three successive study trials to learn either a list of 60 paired associates or a free-recall list of 60 "unrelated" words. During a fourth study trial, they rated on…

Three experiments examined the effect of degree of learning on the amount of normal long-term forgetting of supraspan verbal lists. (Author/PN)

To investigate organizational strategies of educable mentally retarded (EMR) and normal boys, the performance of 30 normal boys (mean IQ 105.1) and 30 EMR boys (mean IQ 69.9), ages 7-12 years, was compared on various free recall learning tasks. Three measures of input organization employed were category clustering, associative clustering, and…

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…

In two separate paired-associate learning experiments each employing 40 university students as subjects, the contribution of individual differences (IDs) in arousal to short- and long-term retention was investigated using IDs in salivary response to lemon juice stimulation as an index of arousal. Experimental subjects were pre-selected out of 184…

To obtain an a priori estimate of natural language mediators (NLM's) 320 pairs of words with the consonant-vowel-consonant-pattern (CVC's) were broken into four series of 90 pairs and presented to 240 male and female undergraduates. Pairs were shown for 15 seconds while the subjects wrote down any associative device or NLM they could generate that…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of elaborated presentation on noun-pair retention. A 2 x 2 factorial design was used with aural-verbal presentation (standard versus elaborated) and visual-pictorial presentation (standard versus elaborated). Subjects for one experiment were 64 second-grade children from a Mexican-American…

The effect of presentation time on learning under varying mediation instructions demonstrated a time-dependent difference in the facilitating effect of imagery generation or sentence generation instructions. Subjects were junior high school students working in a paired associate task with concrete nouns. Both cognitive strategies were more…

This research on factors influencing verbal learning and retention has used new techniques, attacked new problems, and tested new theories while trying to keep the experiments systematic. Studies conducted involved (1) the effect of varying the length of the intertrial interval on the learning and retention of different types of learning tasks;…

Sixty young men between 18 and 26 years of age and 60 within the 65-75 year age range, matched for verbal ability and socioeconomic status, were given two paired associate learning tasks differing in level of difficulty under neutral, supportive, and challenging instructions. Older persons revealed a greater performance decrement on the more…

Eight experiments studied the following aspects of associative strategies in learning: classification; verbalization at three developmental levels; verbalization by normal and educable children; facilitation of associative learning among educable retardates; effectiveness of familiarization and differentiation training on the successful employment…