Eight pianists with mild to moderate mental retardation and eight comparison pianists without retardation were asked to duplicate chord sequences of varying length and musical structure in an immediate memory format. All participants were sensitive to the structural dimensions of the material, and differences between groups were restricted to the…

A meta-analysis was conducted of 22 studies in which verbal stimuli were used as targets in episodic memory tasks. Of the 24 comparisons, 21 supported the hypothesis that these tasks require self-initiated operations and display a gradation of age-related deficits. (SK)

Examined whether false belief recall in three-year olds is inaccessible without cues, and whether cue-aided recall is accompanied by insight. Six experiments varied a core procedure involving cues and child reports of and about their beliefs. Found that the ability to recall one's own false belief was attained around 3.5 years of age. (BC)

Three studies examined young children's understanding that, if one "remembers" or "forgets," one must have known something previously. The majority of four-year olds, but not three-year olds, understood that, when two characters currently knew something, the one with prior knowledge remembered and that, when neither character…

A theoretical framework of working memory is proposed in which cognitive processes are viewed as a sequence of stable states representing end products of processing. In skilled activities, acquired memory skills allow these end products to be stored in long-term memory and kept accessible through short-term memory retrieval cues. (SLD)

Results of a 15-year research program on how implicitly activated memories affect remembering are presented, and a model is proposed to describe such influences. Experiments with 240 college students to evaluate the exclusivity of sources of information in the models are described, and implications of the findings are discussed. (SLD)

Describes an experiment exploring the effectiveness of four teaching methods: formal teaching, guided discovery, free discovery, and play. Concludes that all methods except free discovery are effective as long as memory is emphasized. Includes the tests used for the experiment in four appendices. Relates present results to previous research. (DK)

Six experiments measured preschoolers' ability to remember the affective reactions of characters in television shows. In two experiments, less than 1 percent of characters' reactions were recalled. In three experiments, children accurately recognized labels for reactions immediately after their portrayal but showed reductions in recognition memory…

Finds that, among college students, (1) both related and unrelated cuts resulted in cardiac orienting responses; (2) processing unrelated cuts required more capacity than processing related cuts; and (3) memory was better for information presented after related cuts, with this effect greater for visual memory than for audio memory. (SR)

The relationship between reasoning ability, as indicated by performance on conventional reasoning tests, and working memory capacity was investigated in 4 studies involving 723, 412, 414, and 595 military recruits, respectively. The results demonstrate a consistently high correlation between general reasoning ability and general working-memory…

Investigates the influence of vocal intonation on five- and seven-year-old children's processing of explicit and implicit text concepts. Assesses comprehension of narratives through cued recall, recognition, and free recall tasks. Concludes that young children assign more weight to vocal information in making assessments of story outcome than do…

Examined the contribution of specific contextual attributes to six-month-old infants' recognition of a well-learned cue. Infants did not encode contextual information in a holistic manner. The perceptual identification of contextual cues that were represented in the memory of an event was requisite for the retrieval of the memory. (GLR)

Wayfinding abilities of 6- and 12-year-old children were compared with those of young adults. Six-year-old children's wayfinding performance was poorest. Twelve-year-old children and adults had similar performances. (GLR)

Outlines a psychophysiological (involuntary responses to novel environmental stimuli) model of the role of orienting responses (ORs) in learning from televised lectures. Demonstrates that insertion of videographics in talking-head lectures produces ORs in television viewers. Finds that ORs enhance learning of familiar material but interfere with…

Children and adults learned associations between line length and color. Subjects were then presented with pairs of colors and asked to choose the color that had been associated with the longer line. For all ages, choice reaction times were related to differences in, and ratios of, line lengths. (BC)