This study examined the effect of the occurrence of homophones in instructional materials on the learning of new vocabulary. Forty-two junior high school seventh graders were randomly assigned to two groups of 21 each. Group one was exposed to a set of six slides that showed sentences using homophonic pairs of words (juxtaposed sentences) and then…

This experiment examined two processes which might account for developmental increases in accuracy in visual recognition tasks: age-related increases in efficiency of scanning during inspection, and age-related increases in the ability to make decisions systematically during test. Critical details necessary for recognition were highlighted as…

Averaged evoked potential (AEP) is an event-related brain response obtained by averaging the scalp electrical potentials elicited by repeated presentations of the same event. It has proven to be an accurate measure of the activity of the mature human brain when involved in a wide variety of psychological tasks. Distinct psychological processes…

This report focuses on the development of general problem-solving skills which are subsumed under the general heading of metacognition: in particular, the skills of predicting, checking, monitoring, reality testing, and coordinating and controlling deliberate attempts to learn or solve problems. The report is organized in five sections: an…

A study was conducted to provide an assessment of the general efficiency of working memory in relation to level of field articulation. The task required a subject to retain a series of digits for subsequent report while performing a semantic modification of a target phrase. The working memory hypothesis predicts that the joint impact of high…

Thirty-two parent couples participated in this investigation to determine whether learning patterns established in the home environment significantly affect a child's later cognitive development in traditionally school-taught subjects. This research report outlines the methodology used in the study, explains the operational criteria for the four…

The theoretical framework for investigating human planning behavior and the procedures, results, and implications of two experiments involving planning in the domain of software design are presented in this report. A plan is defined as a hierarchical structure that underlies the solution to a problem; planning is the process of constructing this…

The final report describes a project to devise and field test methods of assessing short-term memory in deaf blind children. It is explained that four tests of short-term memory were devised (Body Touch - Sighted Version, Body Touch - Blind or Blindfolded Version, Removed Object Test, and Finger Touch Test) and field tested with 32 children (8-15…

A set of studies investigated the relative importance of operative schemes and figurative (rote) memory. In Study I, 60 concrete operational children from grades 1-4 were asked to reconstruct two types of stimuli from memory. In order to separate the effects of operative and figurative skill use, learning disabled children with poor figurative…

The paper reports results and discusses implications of three studies on captioning films and television programs for deaf audiences. Study I dealt with the short-term visual memory required in recognition of fingerspelled letters, while study II focused on serial position effects and forward making (interference produced by first stimulus on the…

Written for professionals who design and teach in preschool programs this paper reviews research on memory abilities of young children and examines the relationship between knowledge and memory among preschool children. Preliminary research of the hypothesis that elementary school environments press children to develop memory strategies is…

In this study the relationship between mother's teaching style (verbal instruction vs. demonstration) and the child's performance on four memory tests was investigated. Mothers' teaching style with 9-year-old children was observed in an induced teaching situation in the home, in a Guatemalan Maya town. In the induced teaching situation, the mother…

It sometimes happens that one is unable to recall a word or name that he feels he knows very well. This state of frustrated recall is referred to as a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience. Two experiments were devised to compare the ability of a weak trace and a decoding-failure model to predict the conditions under which TOT reports would be most…

This paper reports on three studies concerned with aspects of human visual information processing. Study I was an effort to measure the duration of iconic storage using a partial report method in children ranging in age from 6 to 13 years. Study II was designed to detect age related changes in the rate of processing (perceptually encoding) letters…

Several different issues in the temporal coding of words were subjected to experimental analysis. Two experiments evaluated three response measures (recency judgments, position judgments, lag judgments) used to index temporal coding. Lag judgments were found to be of little use; subjects could make valid position and recency judgments without…