Three experiments examined whether the perception and retention of feature relations, thought to be critical for object recognition in adults, are evident in early infancy. Three month olds' 24-hour retention was disrupted when features of a 6-item mobile were recombined, indicating that they not only encode feature relations but also remember…

Four experiments investigated conceptual categorization in 7- to 11-month-old infants. Data revealed global differentiation of animals and vehicles, with lack of differentiation of basic level categories within the animal domain, in contrast to data from other studies designed to assess perceptual categorization. Results suggest that infants may…

Investigated long-term consistency and change in maternal style for talk about the past and relationships of those styles to children's memory participation. Nineteen mother-child dyads talked about shared past events at four time points. Resulting patterns indicated clear and enduring maternal narrative style differences and that these…

Connections between gifted intellect and creativity and Klaus Riegel's Dialectical Psychology are discussed. Dialectical Psychology is explained in terms of the set-theoretic operation of symmetric difference and the set-theoretic complement thereof. It is shown how this structure is involved in developmental psychology, memory, learning, gifted…

Discusses large-scale software development and describes the development of the Designer Assistant to improve software development effectiveness. Highlights include the knowledge management problem; related work, including artificial intelligence and expert systems, software process modeling research, and other approaches to organizational memory;…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of promoting relational thinking, using "elaborative interrogation" techniques, to facilitate the content acquisition of 36 elementary school students with mild disabilities. Results indicated that students coached in relational thinking who generated their own explanations outperformed students who…

Investigated whether children's recognition memory for movement in photographs is distorted forward in the direction of implied motion. When asked whether the second photograph was the same as or different from the first, subjects made more errors for test photographs showing the action slightly forward in time, compared with slightly backward in…

This study of sequential memory in 16 children with language impairment found that list-final suffix effect was substantially larger than in control children, even though other aspects of their recall were normal. Children with language impairment were more dependent upon unanalyzed acoustic and phonetic representations of speech. Response…

Fourteen children (ages 72-134 months) with specific language impairment (SLI) and 13 with normal language completed a nonsense word repetition task and a sentence comprehension task. Results suggest that SLI children have diminished phonological working memory capacity and that this capacity deficit compromises their sentence comprehension…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 6-month-old infants with and without Down syndrome presented with a visual recognition memory task. The ERP morphology was the same for both groups. The chronometry of information processing by infants with Down syndrome was similar to or faster than "normal" infants' processing.…

Within a small bounded space, the location of a hidden object can be coded in terms of distance information, general area of hiding, or the boundary of the space. The use of these three coding strategies by infants was examined using a visual search task. Results indicated boundary information and the nature of the change influenced coding of…

Assessed three- to six-year-olds' understanding of their own knowledge on different see-know tests. Found a significant positive association between passing see-know tests and free recall, which persisted even when cued recall and verbal intelligence were partialed out. (MDM)

Two experiments were conducted with 124 undergraduate and graduate students to investigate the interaction between strategy use and accessibility to relevant knowledge. Variations in relevant knowledge accessibility significantly affected strategy use on the first memorization trial, and ease of use on the first trial affected maintenance of the…

This investigation explored recognition memory for sign language vocabulary in sign language students. Ten beginning and 10 advanced students were asked to judge their familiarity with 50 old and new vocabulary items presented in both written (sign gloss) and signed stimulus modes. (JL)

This commentary discusses three issues raised by Brainerd and others' research on forgetting: (1) measurement of forgetting rates; (2) differentiation of storage from retrieval factors; and (3) implications of findings for procedure- or strategy-oriented memory development theories. (BC)