Most college instructors probably are not about to start giving the daily quizzes that some researchers recommend to improve learning, so students might want to try testing themselves when they study on their own. But there's a catch: When people study with flashcards, by far the most common method of self-quizzing, they're notoriously bad at…

Memory for feature binding comprises a key ingredient in coherent object representations. Previous studies have been equivocal about human capacity for objects in the visual working memory. To evaluate memory for feature binding, a type identification paradigm was devised and used with a multiple-object permanence tracking task. Using objects…

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is one of the most commonly used paradigms for the study of implicit learning and the contrast between rules, similarity, and associative learning. Despite five decades of extensive research, however, a satisfactory theoretical consensus has not been forthcoming. Theoretical accounts of AGL are reviewed, together…

This paper reports on one experiment in which we investigated the relationship between reading and signing skills. We administered a vocabulary task and a story comprehension task in Sign Language of the Netherlands and in written Dutch to a group of 87 deaf children from bilingual education programs. We found a strong and positive correlation…

This paper reports on one experiment in which we investigated the relationship between reading and signing skills. We administered a vocabulary task and a story comprehension task in Sign Language of the Netherlands and in written Dutch to a group of 87 deaf children from bilingual education programs. We found a strong and positive correlation…

We examined the relationship between cognitive capacity and heuristic responding on four types of reasoning and decision-making tasks. A total of 84 children, between 5 years 2 months and 11 years 7 months of age, participated in the study. There was a marked increase in heuristic responding with age that was related to increases in cognitive…

The relationship between working memory, intelligence and problem-solving is explored. Wittmann and Suss [Wittmann, W.W., & Suss, H.M. (1999). Investigating the paths between working memory, intelligence, knowledge, and complex problem-solving performances via Brunswik symmetry. In P.L. Ackerman, R.D. Roberts (Ed.), "Learning and individual…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder often described as being characterized by a dissociative cognitive architecture, in which profound impairments of visuo-spatial cognition contrast with relative preservation of linguistic, face recognition and auditory short-memory abilities. This asymmetric and dissociative cognition…

Recent theoretical developments in the field of absolute identification have stressed differences between relative and absolute processes, that is, whether stimulus magnitudes are judged relative to a shorter term context provided by recently presented stimuli or a longer term context provided by the entire set of stimuli. The authors developed a…

Some children with autism demonstrate poor nonword repetition--a deficit considered to be a psycholinguistic marker of specific language impairment (SLI). The present study examined whether there is an SLI subtype among children with autism. We compared the language abilities of children with SLI (n = 34, M age = 11;10 S.D. = 2;3), and children…

A number of universities offer fully web-based language courses. Many others are considering this option. Yet it remains unclear whether web-based courses can be as comprehensively effective as classroom-based courses. And, if so, what might an effective web-based language course look like? This dissertation considers the German Online at PSU…

Normal children (N=8) and two groups of 8 learning disabled (LD) elementary grade children, one with and one without a short-term memory deficit, were administered a battery of questions concerning knowledge of how their memories function (metamemory). Metamemory was found to be deficient only in the subgroup of LD children with a short-term…

The relationship between naming time and order memory was examined in an experiment with 40 educable mentally retarded (EMR) and 40 nonretarded elementary grade children. Order memory and digit span had significant correlations for both groups. Naming time was found to correlate with span only for EMR subjects. (Author/DB)

Two experiments using event-related potentials (ERPs) investigated recognition memory in infants. ERPs were recorded to 100 identical aural stimuli. Fifty familiar and 50 novel stimuli were presented 24 hours later. Results suggest that establishment of memory trace involved a process by which responses to repeated events were more consistent when…

Results of seven experiments involving 112 college students or staff using a dual-task approach provide evidence that encoding information into short-term memory involves a distinct process termed short-term consolidation (STC). Results suggest that STC has limited capacity and that it requires central processing mechanisms. (SLD)