Contends that teaching students to depend on written material without teaching effective habits of recall should be discouraged. (RB)

Research supported by Grant No. GB-6839 from the National Science Foundation.

Recent investigations of the cognitive components of human-environmental interactions owe much to the work of city planner Kevin Lynch, who hypothesized cognitive mapping as a two-way interactive process between individuals and their environment. Lynch identified five elements which individuals used in the construction of cognitive maps,…

In discussing the relationship between cognitive development (perception, pattern recognition, and memory) and reading processes, this paper especially emphasizes developmental factors. After an overview of some issues that bear on how written language is processed, the paper presents a discussion of pattern recognition, including general pattern…

A series of experimental and theoretical investigations of text inference were conducted. One applied a theory of inferable text cohesion to the devising of text structure revisions that assist comprehension and memory. Since only modest success was achieved, the next three projects went beyond text revision to the use of adjunct outlines,…

Two experiments were conducted to ascertain whether the reader uses phonological cues, semantic cues, or both types of cues in identifying letter combinations. Sixty introductory psychology students participated in the first experiment, which tested the differential effects of phonological and semantic cues on the speed with which a verbal unit…

This booklet, the product of a second seminar on the chemical transfer of memory, summarizes the current research work presented at the seminar including future implications for education as perceived by the 12 biochemists and psychologists who participated. Developments described include 1) the memory-transfer experiments of James McConnell from…

In three experiments using a single-trial, free-recall procedure, subjects were sometimes presented a forget cue during a list, meaning that they were not responsible for recalling any of the words which preceded it, only those which followed it. Since the primacy effect over the functional beginning of such lists was not diminished, the proactive…

It was predicted that two variables would influence recognition memory for complex visual stimuli: association values, and the realistic-abstract dimension, or "objectivity". The stimuli were 12 reproductions of realistic paintings (clearly representing real world objects), six of high association value and six of low; and 12 abstract pictures,…

The purpose of this study was to gather evidence relative to the proposition that matching (recognition) performance for A-B pairs following an unlearning paradigm cannot be used to infer associative loss. The alternative was to assume that matching performance is based on frequency information which is independent of associative information. The…

This experiment investigated the assumption that children's learning and retention of prose material can be differentially affected by varying discrepancy from expectation (as established by an advance organizer). It was hypothesized that a passage which differed significantly from expectation would produce heightened arousal, which should in turn…

The quality of redundancy in language usage can be examined to determine its effect on communication efficiency. Semiotic redundancy, defined as the quantity of prolixity between semantic and pragmatic information, has the potential of reducing equivocation and error and, at the optimal level, provides maximum communication efficiency. Thus,…

This report describes seven basic experiments designed to further elucidate the nature and function of two types of organization imposed by subjects in a free-recall type of memory task. The experiments involved verbal stimulus materials and employed college students as subjects. The two types of organization investigated were category clustering,…

Retention of verbal material presented in a normal linear manner was compared to retention of the same material presented in simultaneous messages for this study. The subjects were 180 undergraduates, and each was randomly assigned to one of the nine experimental groups formed by combinations of presentation--linear, two simultaneous messages, or…