The multivariate effect of task sequence, memory support, and state anxiety was investigated using a nonverbal concept acquisition task. Ninety-five Indian college students were randomly assigned to four treatment conditions resulting from the task sequences of 1) easy-to-hard and 2) hard-to-easy and from memory support versus nonmemory support.…

The purpose of this pamphlet is to increase teachers' comprehension of anxiety and its relation to children's thinking and forgetting, to their problem solving ability and their sense of competence. The pamphlet describes four parts of the anxiety experience: 1) the anxiety cue, the particular thought, memory, or sensation which precipitates the…

Research has indicated that across the second to fifth grade range, there was evidence to suggest a difference between the oldest and youngest groups in the memory representations which directed recall of logically related sentences. The developmental trend was from what seemed to be an unstable and fragmentary memory rperesentation, which…

A total of 34 children, ages 2 and a half to 6, were presented with sentences for imitation that either violated or honored a prenominal adjective ordering rule, which requires that size adjectives must precede color adjectives. Two response measures were evaluated in terms of these sentence types: latency to begin a sentence imitation and recall…

Children's short-term memory was studied under two experimental conditions: one in which recall was expected to be facilitated because of the provision of a study period, and one in which a distracting task was imposed that was expected to interfere with recall. Forty subjects at each of two age levels, 7 and 11 years, were tested in a…

Prompts in concept classification normally occur on the stimulus, while in memorization tasks prompts customarily are given on the response. Opposite results have been obtained for these two tasks with excessive prompting. This study used English-Russian word pairs to compare stimulus prompts (underlining the English word) with response prompts in…

The mediating role of learning in the relationship between repeated exposure and affect was explored and supported in three experiments involving a total of 229 undergraduate participants. It was found that both learning and affect measures behaved in essentially the same way as a function of exposure duration (experiments I and III), serial…

When one learns complex material, the important thing appears to be the ability to understand the material. Once understanding occurs, learning and remembering follow automatically. The conventional psychological literature says little about the processes involved in the learning of complex material--material that takes weeks, months, and even…

Three short studies were conducted on long-term effects of visual perception training on perceptual memory, involving the visual illusion of apparent movement, in educable and trainable mentally retarded children (EMR and TMR) and in learning disabled children (LD). Variables were lengths of training session and retention interval. Tables…

This book presents a description of a new theory of memory which departs from existing concepts. It integrates and explains in detail the recent research findings in sentence memory, language comprehension, search on long term memory, verbal learning, and forgetting and imagery. It also reports new experiments which clarify these issues. A major…

Piaget explains the stage IV error as a failure to assimilate the new place of hiding rather than a forgetting of it. His hypothesis predicts that the likelihood of error should not vary with the length of the delay interval. Nine-month-old infants delayed 0, 1, 3, or 7 seconds before having the opportunity to search. Infants in all conditions,…

A series of pilot experiments were carried out to investigate the influence of stress induced by load and interference on the acquisition and retention of a path finding skill, and to investigate the relationship between two path finding strategies--retention of strings of instructions and understanding of global relationships--as components of…

Research conducted to determine the effect of certain measurable characteristics of written material upon speed of memorization is presented. The characteristics studied fall into four classes: (1) Load measures reflecting informational density, (2) Length measures based upon number of syllables, words, kernel sentences, clauses, or sentences in a…

This study examined the interactive relations among note-taking (NT), adjunct questions (AQ), and paying attention (PA) by students in lecture situations. The subject pool consisted of 154 students enrolled in basic psychology at the University of Massachusetts. Three aptitude tests were administered to all subjects. These tests measured (1) short…

A theory of learning and forgetting is proposed which uses an information processing (IP) model. The IP model views learning as a process of storing, retrieving, and outputing information from a permanent memory. The concept of information pattern is important to the IP model because the pattern of information determines how the information will…