Nine closed head injured (CHI) children (mean age 11 years) with post-onset intervals of 7 months to 8 years were given an overt free recall task. Quantitative analysis suggested inefficient passive rehearsal strategy by severely injured subjects. Qualitative analysis revealed differences between CHI children and controls in rehearsal strategies,…

Thirty-six learning disabled (LD) and 36 nondisabled children (mean age = 12) were presented with sentences under either of 2 conditions and then given a recognition and source attribution task. The study concluded that, though LD children did not differ in recognition performance, results did suggest that children with LD possess a general…

Argues that although people may have trouble recalling discrete news stories in recall examinations, it seems likely that they acquire "common knowledge" from the news media; and time is an important variable in helping people to remember news if they use it to think about new information in the context of previously stored knowledge. (SR)

Maintains that Muller and Overton (1998) misrepresent her theory of infant concept formation in infancy, makes corrections to their representation, and notes that her theory was developed in part because of the lack of detailed mechanisms in Piaget's theory to account for concept formation. Argues that Muller and Overton's proposed alternative…

Investigates the relation between comprehension skill and the ability to locate information. Results reveal that good comprehenders were more efficient than poor comprehenders when they were required to locate specific pieces of information in a text. Findings suggest that good comprehenders' superior search strategy may arise because of their…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures were used to study the potential effects of individual differences in verbal working memory capacity on the processing of sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity in German. Results indicate that syntactic processes in language comprehension are related to individual differences in…

Notes young children's fast mapping ability for word and fact learning. Finds children's extension of a new word to novel objects from same category but lack of extension for new facts, as replicated by Waxman and Booth, unsurprising. Poses more interesting question: is word learning done solely through more general cognitive systems or through…

Offers brief descriptions of 41 good books for children offering a treasury of memory, memoir, and stories. Presents books in the following categories: storytellers, folktales, voices, family, artifacts, and preservation. (SR)

Presents new measure of children's use of an editing operation that suppresses false memories by accessing verbatim traces of true events. Application of the methodology showed that false-memory editing increased dramatically between early and middle childhood. Measure reacted appropriately to experimental manipulations. Developmental reductions…

Investigates the developmental changes in the contributions of comprehension ability and the meta-cognitive control of several study strategies (selection, memory, monitoring) to competence in studying among average and above-average seventh and eleventh-grade students. Indicates that the ability to comprehend and meta-cognitive control of study…

Comparison for memory for spatial location of 30 persons with and 30 persons without mental retardation found the control group recalled more intentionally learned than incidentally learned locations. The experimental group performed better after incidental learning than after intentional learning and scored as highly as controls on incidental…

Three studies involved kindergartners in a categorization task with an adult in collaborative and noncollaborative conditions; tested subjects on memory of who had performed which actions; and asked them to recategorize items independently. Results suggested that one process contributing to children's internalization of knowledge may involve…

Examines how viewers or readers process and remember media narratives such as entertainment, news, and information. Considers how this is critical to the understanding of the mental processing of television and other media. Finds that undergraduate students who participated in two experiments remembered atypical story items much better even a week…

Presents finding of two studies designed to test the theory that limitations in working memory pose a lower limit to reading rate for effective prose recall. Tests college students, young adults and older adults, finding no evidence to support the theory. (NH)

A study of 57 Australian children (ages 6-7) found that children who experienced a recurrent event were more accurate about details that remained constant across events in comparison with children who experienced the event only once. They also produced more responses to both free recall and to general questions. (CR)