A series of studies has investigated the possibility that human infants performing tasks exhibit something like the P300, a positive-going brain wave associated with task performance and the updating of working memory among adults. Findings indicate that, when infants have the opportunity to form a template against which to compare a previously…

How various types of repetition influence the development of memory for real-world events was investigated in a naturalistic case study of a 2-year-old's autobiographic memories as revealed in mother-child conversation recorded when the child was between 21 and 27 months of age. Two types of repetition were studied: repeated recall of the same…

There are two dominant approaches to understanding human memory, one in the tradition of Ebbinghaus, the other in the tradition of Bartlett. The former approach views learning as the formation of associations, while the latter views memory as the process of reconstruction of fragments based on prior knowledge. These positions are often considered…

Tests of spatial ability that were designed to minimize the effects of sociocultural expectations on performance were administered to adults of both sexes. The tests examined spatial problem-solving, spatial memory, and psychomotor spatial performance, as measured by three "throwing tasks." Thirty-four male and 34 female university…

For each work assignment, photojournalists must decide whether to use black-and-white or color film and how to frame the picture. These decisions are considered crucial, yet little is known about how the presence of color and design complexity affect how people process the information in photographs. A study tested whether color and design…

This essay considers whether the brain can accelerate the speed with which it absorbs or dispenses information in ways similar to those of a computer, and, if so, whether any of these speed-up approaches increase the speed of the processing of the information in the brain. It is suggested that there are tasks for which speed is important in both…

The first section of this manual provides background on storytelling and the importance of storytelling for children, describes the essential elements of the storytelling process, and discusses the place of storytelling in the schools. Language arts and creative skills developed by storytelling are also identified. Guidelines for choosing a story,…

Self-efficacy, or a person's perception of his/her own mastery of a skill, affects subsequent task performance and predictions of future performance. To examine older adults' metamemorial knowledge with respect to predicting their performance on everyday and laboratory memory tasks, 28 adults (22 females, 6 males), aged 58 to 80 years, completed a…

This paper reviews work on the representation of knowledge from within psychology and artificial intelligence. The work covers the nature of representation, the distinction between the represented world and the representing world, and significant issues concerned with propositional, analogical, and superpositional representations. Specific topics…

This paper discusses several critical issues concerning feedback in instruction and proposes a text synthesis research paradigm to investigate these variables. The paper is based on the assumption that feedback, a significant adjunct aid in instruction, is currently by and large ineffectual except in some simple instructional contexts. Section 1…

Although metamemory has recently received renewed interest by several investigators, individual differences in memory skills have received little if any attention. While individual differences in memory skills have common sense validity, these differences have been difficult to document experimentally. This study used a repeated measures design to…

Seven memory strategies that can be taught to college students with learning disabilities or students who have not learned essential study skills are described: the method of loci, pegwords, keywords, rote rehearsal, chaining, clustering, and first letter mnemonics. To help college faculty provide direct instruction in the memory strategies, the…

The conference described in this report was designed to explore fundamentally important aspects of educating 3- through 13-year-old children in a variety of school settings. A total of 250 participants, representing 17 states, attended. This volume provides the text of a conference paper by Melvin D. Levine, M.D., entitled "The Challenge of…

WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) and WRAT (Wide Range Achievement Test) data from the first sample of 60 children with uncomplicated meningomyelocele (a neurological condition) were examined to determine their deviation from test norms. A second sample of 46 children was tested with the WISC-R, WRAT, VMI (Visual Motor Integration)…

To determine whether Downs Syndrome (DS) persons' recall could be improved by procedures that minimized auditory and visual distractions during auditory memory tasks, 16 DS, 12 non-DS mentally retarded and 12 non-mentally retarded persons (mean ages 16, 16, and 5 years, matched for mental age) listened to, looked at, and tried to remember digit…