Investigated effects of structured reminiscent intervention upon elderly cognitive functioning. Volunteers were given learning tasks using material from their past lives, asked to perform operations on new material, or given no treatment. Findings suggested stimulating cognitive functioning in older people is worthwhile, and memories can provide…

The buffer model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin gives a valid measure of primary-memory capacity (i.e., the estimate is close to the true value), a property lacking in both the original Waugh and Norman method and Watkins' modifications of that method. (Author/PN)

The effectiveness of training a semantic integration strategy for recall of pictograph sequences and the generalization of the strategy to a related oral sentence task were examined in 60 kindergarten prereaders. (Author/MP)

Suggests that adult interest in children's books results from a sense of responsibility and love for children, an urge to assist and instruct them, a desire to entertain them, and, most of all, from the memories adults have of their own childhoods. (AEA)

The author partially describes a few of the immanent qualities of dreaming imagery and metaphor. The concept of the ineluctable modality is introduced to illustrate the spontaneous synthesizing of cognitive and noncognitive elements. A short dream excerpt is shared to clarify the pervasive contrapuntallike depth of dreaming imagery. (Author/SJL)

Three experiments examined the notion that children's primacy and recency in the probe-type pictorial memory task are related to the spatial distinctiveness of the "leftmost" and "rightmost" items presented. Data suggest that preschoolers and older children alike are able to code temporal order along with the corresponding…

Reality monitoring concerns the ability to distinguish knowledge that an individual has produced internally (through reasoning, imagination, etc.) from knowledge that was obtained through experience (or "externally"). A model of reality monitoring is proposed and discussed. (JKS)

Tested the persistence over 24 hours of reward-expectation habits in infants. A comparison was made between the responses of two groups of infants (infants with a history of reinforcement with large, complex mobiles, and infants with no prior history of reinforcement with mobiles) on a task reinforced by a small mobile. (Author/SS)

A choice reaction time experiment was performed in order to assess the information processing characteristics of 12-year-old reading-disabled children. (Author/MP)

In this investigation, underlined words in a text were recalled both immediately and in the long term significantly better by students who had studied the text, and this result was not obtained at the expense of other items of information in the text. (JD)

Immediate recall measures on one or both types of stimuli were recorded under two conditions: (1) in which stimuli were close together and (2) in which they were separate. Results indicated that normal children selectively attended significantly better than LD children under Condition 1 but not in Condition 2, in which both groups were equal.…

The accuracy of memory span (digit span) estimation by 160 educable mentally retarded Ss at two different mental age levels (8 and 11 years) was assessed, and the effects of explicit strategy training, generalized instructions, and no training on recall performance and apportionment of study time were compared. (Author/DLS)

The author offers 16 sight word "tricks" that children can use to remember the spelling of 25 common sight words. Materials and techniques for teaching sight words are also suggested. (SBH)

Reports an experiment with five-year-old children which tested the hypothesis that a change in affect between input and test interferes with performance in a nominally noncued free recall test but not with performance on a cued recall test. (JMB)

It is argued that the dialectical model of memory development seems more promising than behavoristic, information processing and contextual models. (MS)