Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was…

Despite several decades of activity, alcohol expectancy research has yet to merge measurement approaches with developing memory theory. This article offers an expectancy assessment approach built on a conceptualization of expectancy as an information processing network. The authors began with multidimensional scaling models of expectancy space,…

The motor control of 49 unmedicated boys clinically diagnosed with ADHD, case-matched with 49 non-ADHD boys, was assessed while playing Crash Bandicoot I, a SonyTM Playstation platform computer video game. In Crash Bandicoot participants control the movements of a small-animated figure through a hazardous jungle environment. Operationally defined…

This article investigates the process of remembering and presents techniques to improve memory retention. Examples of association, clustering, imagery, location, mnemonic devices and visualization illustrate strategies that can be used to encode and recall information from the long-term memory. Several memory games offer the opportunity to test…

This article explores how issues of learning and mothering emerged in research with women students. First it develops the notion of 'a motherhood standpoint'. It then considers how Foucault's concept of 'counter-memory', and, in particular, its reworking in feminist cultural theory as 'countermemory', can be used to explain why students…

Recent research has shown that both the speed and accuracy of novel motor skills improve during sleep in a process called consolidation. Such off-line learning in the absence of practice as yet has been experimentally observed only with learners performing relatively simple tasks. In the experiment we report here, we tested whether experienced…

We report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.g., "Did Anna dress the baby?"). The…

The theory of memory and the ability to influence learning with conscious and unconscious factors, both internal and external, is reviewed. From a connectionist view of memory, the interactive compensatory model of learning is introduced, with an emphasis on the plastic components (motivation, prior knowledge, and metacognition) that can be…

Research evidence indicates that self-report imagery ability is psychometrically distinct from objective, spatial test measures. One hypothesis put forward in the literature to explain this finding is that the nature of the stimulus is important. The aim of this article was to examine the relation between spatial abilities and measures of visual…

In 1987, Hideaki Tomoyori, a Japanese memorist, set a world record for reciting the first 40,000 digits of pi. The authors report results from a series of tests that give a view of Tomoyori's memory performance compared with that of a control group, matched for age and educational level. He showed very good scores on tasks with digits, such as…

The aim of the present research was to study age-related changes in duration reproduction by differentiating the working memory processes underlying this time estimation task. We compared performances of young and elderly adults in a duration reproduction task performed in simple and concurrent task conditions. Participants were also administered…

By understanding the different types of memory, the neurophysiology of brain chemical and anatomical changes associated with memory, and the ways to enhance the memory process, teachers can utilize proven technique--and develop their own--to guide students over that bleak terrain of memorization. From simplest recall of awareness, memory skills…

The role of categorical versus associative relations in 5-, 7-, and 11-year-old children's true and false memories was examined using the Deese--Roediger--McDermott (DRM) paradigm and categorized lists of pictures or words with or without category labels as primes. For true items, recall increased with age and categorized lists were better…

Phonological awareness is strongly related to reading ability, but reports are more conflicting concerning the association of high level oculomotor skills with reading. Here, we show that phonological awareness is specifically associated with the ability to perform smooth pursuit eye movements in preschool children. Two large independent samples…

Four experiments explored the interrelations between working memory, attention, and eye movements. Observers had to identify a tilted line amongst vertical distractors. Each line was surrounded by a colored shape that could be precued by a matching item held in memory. Relative to a neutral baseline, in which no shapes matched the memory item,…