The Kuhn and Pease (p. 279, this issue) article advances the fields of cognitive development and learning by integrating work on executive functions, metacognition, and scientific reasoning. The article also expands developmental work to older children and adults, to personal beliefs, and to social information, and reinvigorates the construct of…

Background: Investigations of the cognitive processes underlying specific language impairment (SLI) have implicated deficits in the storage and processing of phonological information, but to date these abilities have not been studied in the same group of children with SLI. Aims: To examine the extent to which deficits in immediate verbal…

This paper discusses a mental model of learning based on the processes of attention, perception, processing, and application. The learning process starts with attention, such as curiosity, excitement, expectation, or fear; in pedagogy this is called motivation. New impressions are dependent on and interpreted against the background of previous…

Prior studies have often confounded linguistic and perceptual performance when evaluating deaf subjects' skills, a confusion that may be responsible for results indicating lesser recall ability among the deaf. In this series of studies this linguistic/perceptual confound was investigated in both the iconic and short term memory of deaf…

This review of the literature on the workings of the brain in relation to learning and instructional design reviews recent research on both long- and short-term memory, and discusses findings on lateralized or "split-brain" functions. Problems associated with short-term memory are also considered, and the concept of the Tribune Brain is…

Two experiments examining the "distinctiveness of encoding" hypothesis are reported. The hypothesis suggests that specific forms of processing of events may result in the formation of more exact perceptual descriptions and thus more distinctive records in memory. The two experiments reported address shortcomings in previous research on…

A study examined basic reading skills among men in prison, comparing poor and adequate readers with respect to comprehension, decoding, short-term memory, and speech perception. Subjects, 88 inmates of normal intelligence, normal hearing, and no significant speech abnormalities, at a minimum-security prison, were given reading comprehension tests…

Black preschoolers were studied for the effects of memory enhancing training strategies, socioeconomic status, and the order of free and cued recall on story comprehension. The study also tested the utility of Kintsch's expository text analysis procedures in describing the structure of children's stories and children's oral recall of stories. In…

Previous research by A. I. Schulman argued that an observed systematic decline in recognition memory in long word lists was due to the build-up of input and output proactive interference (PI). It also suggested that input PI resulted from process automatization; that is, each list item was processed or encoded in much the same way, producing a set…

Supported by University of Alberta Grant No. 774 (1967).

Several studies have reported adult age deficits in memory for prose materials. Adult age differences in prose comprehension were examined among young and old adults from high or low educational backgrounds. Subjects (N=53) listened to tape-recorded versions of two narrative passages and attempted to orally recall the stories. Subjects were…

In silent reading, short-memory tasks, such as semantic and syntactic processing, require a stage of phonetic encoding between visual representation and the actual extraction of meaning, and this encoding includes prosodic as well as segmental features. To test for this suprasegmental coding, an experiment was conducted in which subjects were…

Obtained self-reports of memory abilities and skills from 50 younger and 50 older adults. General rating questions and specific questions about memory for certain types of content were included. Consistent age-related decrements were found only for general questions, especially those assessing perceived changes over time. Less consistent…

Eighty fourth-graders enrolled in an English/French bilingual program in Canada were administered an auditory skills battery of six tests to measure auditory discrimination and short-term auditory memory. It was concluded that a relationship exists between certain auditory perceptual abilities and school achievement independent of cognitive…

Investigates the power of a macropropositional model of comprehension for a complex social interaction (a rape interrogation) to predict accurate recall by both individuals and groups. The findings are considered in relation to strategic models of discourse comprehension, and the implications for future social psychological research are discussed.…