The effect on reading speed of the number of target items being searched for and the number of target occurrences in the text was examined. The subjects, 24 college undergraduate volunteers, were presented with a list of target words, and then they read a passage for comprehension which contained occurrences of the target words (Experiment1) or…

The experiments discussed in this report do not have a direct relationship to each other but represent work on a series of sub-issues within the general framework of visual processing of information. Because of this discreteness, the report is organized into a series of papers. The first is a general review of tachistoscopic work on iconic memory…

The study was designed to developmentally assess the effect of relational imagery training, unitized pictorial relations, and the combination of both on the recall of noun triplets by 120 first, third and sixth graders. In the unitized picture condition, relations were imposed by the experimenter, whereas the relational imagery training condition…

The question of how people learn and remember information from complex written materials is explored by means of Grime's semantic grammar of propositions and the author's analysis of the content structure of prose. This paper, presented at the 1973 Interdisciplinary Meeting on Structural Learning, first discusses such elements of the semantic…

The present study attempted to identify and describe individual differences in concept learning. It was hypothesized that if a significant portion of the reliable individual variation in a complex learning situation could be identified and described, it would be reasonable to expect that subsequent predictions could be made about the conditions…

Selected possibilities for improving the listening of kindergarten children were investigated. Seven experimental teachers, seven control teachers, an experimental group (125 kindergarten children), and two control groups (127 and 122 children, respectively) took part in the study. Twenty listening lessons and a Listening Response Test, composed…

The author's stated purpose is to convince the reader that there is practical and theoretical importance in a general principle whereby the greater the amount of interference present during the initial learning of a particular task, the better the subsequent retention to new situations. The author attempts to convince the reader with empirical…

Retroactive inhibition, a loss of memory due to learning other materials between recall and exposure to the original materials, was investigated in relation to prose. Two variables were manipulated in the study: similarity of interpolated stories (dissimilar or similar), and the response requirements (completion-recall or multiple-choice). The 190…

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. The results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for the recall of a sentence than the general term itself, even though the general…

This paper summarizes two studies which examine children's free recall of letter sequences in an auditory presentation. In both studies, sequences of six or eight letters were presented to 80 third-grade and 80 eighth-grade pupils, at the rate of one item every other second or four items per second. In the first study, where recall was either…

Subjects (N=43) aged 50 and more were tested on a Sternberg recognition-memory task to explore the relative effects of depression and altered brain function on short-term memory in later life. Many performance differnces were best accounted for by the additive effects of depression and educational background, rather than by either variable…

A delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) task was used to test several hypotheses about sources of retroactive inhibition (RI) in pigeon short-term memory. (Editor)

The present study, by requiring subjects to decide whether the two words in a stimulus pair have the same or different meanings, is an attempt to measure the time necessary to encode a printed word into a representation of its meaning which is available for subsequent matching. (Author)

Children in grades 1 and 4 and adults were given instruction to image or to verbalize a sentence in order to study a stimulus provided aurally. Both types of instruction enhanced memory, but results indicate the greater requirements for subject-generated mediation to some degree penalized younger subjects and benefited older ones. (GO)

The ability of preschool and 8-year-old children to recall the spatial location of an event was assessed in three experiments in which familiarity, differentiation, and foreknowledge were controlled. Data were interpreted in terms of Piaget's theory of spatial representation development. (GO)