Controlled forgetting in the retarded

Three experiments investigated selective rehearsal by retardates in a serial memory task which was an adaptation of Bjork's (1970) paradigm involving instructions to forget a subset of the material presented. Since previous research indicated that retarded children do not selectively rehearse, and since Bjork's paradigm requires the use of a selective rehearsal strategy, it seemed likely that retardates would fail in this task. Experiment 1 showed that retardates could perform this task, and there was substantial evidence for cumulative rehearsal. The possibility of an averaging artifact in the data of Expt 1 was eliminated in Expt 2 by showing evidence of primacy and facilitation due to the forget instruction for individual Ss. Experiment 3 indicated that the facilitation due to the forget instruction was likely due to the effective use of a selective rehearsal strategy. These results contrast with other findings of no rehearsal in retarded children. It is suggested that response biases may be involved in previous studies of rehearsal.     

The use of the cumulative rehearsal strategy: A developmental study

This study was designed to address two issues: (1) At what age do children spontaneously use a cumulative rehearsal strategy; and (2) What effect does the use of the strategy have on their performance?Twenty-eight children at each of five grade levels (nursery, kindergarten, 1, 3, and 5) were tested in a serial-position recall task. Stimuli were pictures of common objects and animals whose labels were one or two syllables in length. Following testing, the children were asked to report the memory strategy they had used.The assumption was made that children who were using a cumulative rehearsal strategy would perform better on series of one-syllable items than on series of two-syllable items. As predicted, nursery, kindergarten, and first-grade subjects correctly recalled as many two-syllable as one-syllable items: Both third- and fifth-graders recalled significantly more one-syllable than two-syllable items. Results indicated that (1) young children do not spontaneously use a cumulative rehearsal strategy until after first grade, and (2) the use of rehearsal did not facilitate overall performance of the rehearsers relative to the nonrehearsers at any grade level. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications for the study of memory development.     

On the relation between spontaneous perspective taking and other visuospatial processes

Common processes and representations engaged by visuospatial tasks were investigated by looking at four frequently used visuospatial research paradigms, the aim being to contribute to a better understanding of which specific processes are addressed in the different paradigms compared. In particular, the relation between spontaneous and instructed perspective taking, as well as mental rotation of body-part/non-body-part objects, was investigated. To this end, participants watched animations that have been shown to lead to spontaneous perspective taking. While they were watching these animations, participants were asked to explicitly adopt another perspective (Experiment 1), perform a mental object rotation task that involved a non-body-part object (Experiment 2), or perform a mental rotation of a body-part object (Experiment 3). Patterns of interference between the tasks, reflected in the reaction time patterns, showed that spontaneous and instructed perspective taking rely on similar representational elements to encode orientation. By contrast, no such overlap was found between spontaneous perspective taking and the rotation of non-body-part objects. Also, no overlap in orientation representation was evident with mental body-part rotations. Instead of an overlap in orientation representations, the results suggest that spontaneous perspective taking and the mental rotation of body parts rely on similar—presumably, motor—processes. These findings support the view that motor processes are involved in perspective taking and mental rotation of body parts.     

Component processes of an overt rehearsal strategy in young children

The locus of facilitation due to rehearsal was investigated in three experiments with first-grade children. Several different overt acquisition strategies in a four-item sequential memory task were compared, including ordered repetition, item repetition, item labeling, and free strategy conditions. Experiment 1 showed that ordered repetition yields most of the facilitation due to rehearsal, and Experiment 2 demonstrated that the facilitation cannot be attributed to spaced practice. Experiment 3 showed that retrieval practice during study may improve memory performance but that the facilitation due to ordered repetition and retrieval practice is relatively short term. Mere repetition and labeling were not found to be significant component processes of rehearsal in any of the experiments. These results were discussed in terms of their relevance to rehearsal training studies and a differentiation between maintenance and elaborative rehearsal.     

Memory, acquisition, and category clustering in learning-disabled children.

In Experiment 1, single trial, immediate-free recall of learning disabled and nondisabled children was compared. The primacy effect in learning-disabled children was lower, suggesting that rehearsal or other types of elaborative encoding may be deficient in these children. In Experiment 2, acquisition of randomly presented categorical lists in a multitrial-free recall task was compared in learning disabled and nondisabled children. One-half of each group was required to learn the same number of words (34 per list), whereas list length for the other half exceeded the primacy effect of each child in immediate-free recall to the same degree. When the same number of items was learned, acquisition was slower in learning disabled than nondisabled children. When the number of items varied according to the primacy effect of each child, acquisition of both groups was similar. Clustering was lower in learning disabled than nondisabled children. In Experiment 3, multitrial-free recall acquisition of categorical lists was examined in a subject-paced task. When the number of words learned exceeded the primacy effect of each child to the same degree, trials to criterion were similar in both groups but, when the children learned the same number of items, learning-disabled children required more trials to criterion. Presentation rates were faster in learning-disabled children. Presentation rates were negatively correlated with trials to criterion and positively correlated with clustering and primacy in immediate-free recall, suggesting that study time may be taken up by clustering, rehearsal, and/or other encoding strategies. Deficient elaborative encoding may be responsible for the slower acquisition of learning-disabled children.     

Changes in immediate memory strategy under induced muscle tension and with time of day

It is suggested that the influence of arousal on immediate memory may, at least in part, be mediated by changes in strategy, such that subjects are less likely to rely on cumulative subvocal rehearsal of the items under high arousal. Experiment I found a detrimental effect of induced muscle tension on immediate memory, but only when subjects were free to engage in such rehearsal, and not under either enforced vocalisation or articulatory suppression. Experiment II manipulated strategy by instruction, and compared immediate memory at 10.30 (low arousal) with that at 19.30 (high arousal). A 10.30 superiority in immediate memory was found when no specific instructions as to how to either encode/store, or recall, the items were given. This superiority disappeared under four of the five alternative types of instruction where subjects were told to group and rehearse the items during presentation, or to recall the items in a specific order, or both. It is concluded that manipulations commonly held to affect arousal level may indeed influence the type of strategy that subjects spontaneously adopt. This may be responsible for some of the inconsistencies in the arousal and memory literature.     

Bilateral transfer as a function of mental imagery

Three experiments are reported which investigate the role of mental imagery in the bilateral transfer from right to Ie ft hand of rotary pursuit skill. In Experiment 1 both mental imagery and physical rehearsal showed significant positive transfer relative to a control condition. However, work decrement may have accumulated and transferred in the physical rehearsal group thereby depressing this group's left-hand performance. Experiment 2 was conducted under conditions designed to allow work decrement to dissipate prior to transfer to the contralateral limb. The data still showed no difference between physical rehearsal and mental imagery. One interpretation of these data is that work decrement was present under both the physical rehearsal and mental imagery manipulations in Experiment 1. The data from Experiment 3 confirmed this interpretation as well as replicated the positive transfer effects found for mental imagery in Experiments 1 and 2. The data are discussed in terms of central versus peripheral explanatory mechanisms.     

Do children use different forms of verbal rehearsal in serial picture recall tasks? A multi-method study

ABSTRACT

Use of verbal rehearsal is a key issue in memory development. However, we still lack detailed and triangulated information about the early development and the circumstances in which different forms of rehearsal are used. To further understand significant factors that affect children’s use of various forms of rehearsal, the present study involving 108 primary school children adopted a multi-method approach. It combined a carefully chosen word length effect method with a self-paced presentation time method to obtain behavioural indicators of verbal rehearsal. In addition, subsequent trial-by-trial self-reports were gathered. Word length effects in recall suggested that phonological recoding (converting images to names – a necessary precursor for rehearsal) took place, with evidence of more rehearsal among children with higher performance levels. According to self-paced presentation times, cumulative rehearsal was the dominant form of rehearsal only for children with higher spans on difficult trials. The combined results of self-paced times and word length effects in recall suggest that “naming” as simple form of rehearsal was dominant for most children. Self-reports were in line with these conclusions. Additionally, children used a mixture of strategies with considerable intra-individual variability, yet strategy use was nevertheless linked to age as well as performance levels.     

Adaptive choice between articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing in verbal working memory

Because both articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing aid in the maintenance of verbal information in the short term, the present study evaluated the adaptive use of these mechanisms, using a complex span paradigm. In Experiment 1, the phonological similarity of memory list words and the attentional demand of concurrent processing were manipulated. As was predicted, a phonological similarity effect (PSE) appeared only when the concurrent task was attention demanding, thus impairing the use of refreshing and encouraging rehearsal. To verify that PSE indicates the use of rehearsal, participants were instructed to use one of the two mechanisms in Experiments 2 and 3. In accordance wih Experiment 1, the PSE was observed only under rehearsal. Thus, adults could adaptively choose between the two mechanisms. When remembering phonologically confusable materials, they prefer refreshing in order to reduce the impact of phonological characteristics. When available attention is reduced, they favor a less attention-demanding mechanism, rehearsal.     

Bilateral Transfer as a Function of Mental Imagery

Three experiments are reported which investigate the role of mental imagery in the bilateral transfer from right to left hand of rotary pursuit skill. In Experiment 1 both mental imagery and physical rehearsal showed significant positive transfer relative to a control condition. However, work decrement may have accumulated and transferred in the physical rehearsal group thereby depressing this group’s left-hand performance. Experiment 2 was conducted under conditions designed to allow work decrement to dissipate prior to transfer to the contralateral limb. The data still showed no difference between physical re-hearsal and mental imagery. One interpretation of these data is that work decrement was present under both the physical rehearsal and mental imagery manipulations in Experiment 1. The data from Experiment 3 confirmed this interpretation as well as replicated the positive transfer effects found for mental imagery in Experiments 1 and 2. The data are discussed in terms of central versus peripheral explanatory mechanisms.     

Memory and rehearsal characteristics of profoundly deaf children

This study examined whether a deficiency in spontaneous strategy use accounts for deaf children's verbal short-term memory performance. Various colors were presented for 3 s each, followed by a 15-s recall delay. The delay was either unfilled, or subjects were induced to rehearse or were prevented from rehearsing. Sixty-four deaf students from oral and total communication settings, 5 to 15 years of age, were tested. The spontaneous rehearsal of both deaf samples seemed to emerge later than the hearing sample's, and it was both inefficiently implemented and less effective in mediating recall than hearing children's. However, when rehearsal was prevented or was induced in all samples, the deaf recalled as well as, or better than, the hearing. Implications discussed include the need to compare both spontaneous and controlled strategy use in developmental memory studies, and the need to provide additional training for deaf children in the strategies of remembering, as opposed to the content material.     

Short-term memory in deaf and hearing children in relation to stimulus characteristics

Experiment 1 examined short-term memory with a serial probe task in 20 younger (mean age: 6 years, 3 months) and 20 older (mean age: 8 years, 8 months) deaf children. Four sets of stimuli were used: familiar animals, unfamiliar nonsense forms, fingerspelled letters, and lower-case print. In contrast to earlier research with hearing children, strong primacy effects were found with all stimuli at both ages, with frequent gestural and/or oral labeling but little cumulative rehearsal evident. To determine whether results were uniquely tied to deafness, identical procedures were used in Experiment 2 with 20 younger (4 years, 9 months) and 20 older (5 years, 10 months) hearing children. Again, overt activity was common, with strong primacy effects on animals and nonsense forms in the older group and on animals in the younger group. Contrasts between present and earlier findings suggest the need to consider the degree to which stimulus labels are overlearned, the role of nonverbal mediators in rehearsal, and the effects of changing educational experiences.     

Asymmetries in finger-tapping interference produced by mental versus manual rotation of Shepard and Metzler type objects

Two experiments were conducted using dual-task finger-tapping procedures to examine cerebral hemisphere laterization for mental versus manual rotation. Actual three-dimensional block-designs based on Shepard and Metzler's (1971) abstract three-dimensional cubes were constructed. Forty-eight right-handed introductory psychology students participated in each study. The first experiment showed greater right-hand than left-hand interference for mental rotation implicating more left-hemisphere involvement. In contrast, more left-hand than right-hand finger-tapping disruption with manual rotation was observed suggesting more right-hemisphere involvement. A second experiment was conducted to determine if the right-hemisphere involvement found with manual rotation was due to the manual activity of handling and rotating the blocks. Results showed that dual-task interference produced by irrelevant manual rotation combined with mental rotation was not lateralized. Thus, the pattern of results indicate that the manipulospatial processing required in the first experiment was responsible for the asymmetry implicating right-hemisphere involvement.     

Developmental changes in memory: The effects of processing time and rehearsal instructions

An overt rehearsal procedure was used to investigate the relationship between children's rehearsal strategies and free recall performance. Previous work has shown that developmental differences in rehearsal content, rather than rehearsal frequency, affect recall performance. This experiment investigated the effects of increased processing time and rehearsal training upon recall. Third-grade girls (age 8) were able to use additional processing time to increase the activity of their rehearsal, and they showed corresponding improvement in recall. In contrast, third-grade boys (age 8) and sixth-grade boys and girls (age 12) did not take advantage of a slower presentation rate to rehearse more actively, and their recall did not change. Further, even without additional processing time, both the third-grade boys and girls were able to use an instructed active rehearsal strategy to facilitate their recall. The direct manipulation of rehearsal activity and the resulting improvement in recall provide experimental support for the proposed relationship between rehearsal content and recall from long-term memory store.     

Strategy choices by young Braille readers

The hypotheses that in Braille learning coding strategies change with reading level, and coding differs between normal and retarded readers were tested with oddity judgments by blind children. Experiment 1 showed that strategy choices varied with reading level only in association with mental age. By contrast, shape neglect and preference for phonological strategies were shown by retarded readers rather than by matched normal readers. Experiment 2 showed that under instructions to use given coding strategies the retarded were as accurate as normal readers. Accuracy for all forms of coding increased with reading level, but coding word shape was significantly less accurate than other forms of coding, and even correct coding of shape was no faster than semantic or phonological coding. It is concluded that coding the shape of Braille words is unlikely to be a major factor in producing faster Braille reading, and retarded Braille readers differ from normal readers in their spontaneous choice of strategy rather than in the ability to use the relevant codes.     

Imagery,rehearsal, and the compatibility of input-output tasks

Two experiments tested the proposition that recall in an imagery task would be facilitated when the processes instigated during original input and during a rehearsal interval were similar to (compatible with) processes assumed to be initiated by two retrieval formats. In both experiments the subjects listened to tape-recorded messages which described the placements of numbers in an imaginary mental matrix. Experiment 1 used four modes of presenting the original information about the placement of the numbers. Two of the input modes were expected to foster the use of imagery: listening to the tape-recorded messages (L), and listening while shadowing (vocalizing) the messages (LV). The other modes of presentation were expected to encourage verbalized rather than imaginal encoding: listening plus silent reading (LR), and listening plus reading aloud (LRV). Two types of recall tasks were used, one which emphasized imaginal coding (matrix recall) and one which emphasized verbal coding (direction recall). Recall was highest when the input and output tasks were assumed to involve similar types of processing. Thus, Groups L and LV showed higher recall than Groups LR and LRV on the matrix task, but the converse was true for the direction task. In addition, rotation of the information yielded different characteristics for the input-output conditions. Experiment 2 introduced rehearsal instructions. Visualizing rehearsal was more beneficial to matrix recall than verbalizing rehearsal or no explicit rehearsal instructions, and verbalizing rehearsal aided direction recall more than visualizing rehearsal. Various models were discussed.     

On the relationship between recognition speed and accuracy for words rehearsed via rote versus elaborative rehearsal

Tacit within both lay and cognitive conceptualizations of learning is the notion that those conditions of learning that foster "good" retention do so by increasing both the probability and the speed of access to the relevant information. In 3 experiments, time pressure during recognition is shown to decrease accessibility more for words learned via elaborative rehearsal than for words learned via rote rehearsal, despite the fact that elaborative rehearsal is a more efficacious learning strategy as measured by the probability of access. In Experiment 1, participants learned each word using both types of rehearsal, and the results show that access to the products of elaborative rehearsal is more compromised by time pressure than is access to the products of rote rehearsal. The results of Experiment 2, in which each word was learned via either pure rote or pure elaborative rehearsal, exhibit the same pattern. Experiment 3, in which the authors used the response-signal procedure, provides evidence that this difference in accessibility owes not to differences in the rate of access to the 2 types of traces, but rather to the higher asymptotic level of stored information for words learned via elaborative rehearsal.     

Rehearsal dynamics in elementary school children

Several studies on free recall suggest that processes responsible for recall are analogous to processes responsible for rehearsal. In children, the relationship between cumulative rehearsal and recall performance has been proven to be critical; however, the locus of the effect of rehearsal is not yet fully understood. To unfold the mechanisms that come into play in an overt rehearsal free recall task, we assessed rehearsal and recall sequences in children between 8 and 10 years of age. These sequences give information about the context in which items are repeated and rearranged throughout the list and subsequently recalled. Rehearsal sequences consisted mainly of items from neighboring list positions in their original temporal order. The same characteristics were true for recall sequences. Qualitatively, order effects during study and recall did not differ over age groups. However, in older children who were using cumulative rehearsal more intensively, successive rehearsal and recall of items in their original order was more pronounced. Therefore, we suggest that a main feature of item rehearsal with regard to facilitating recall is the strengthening of interitem associations based on the temporal order within a list and that this characteristic develops with age.     

心算困难儿童的语音复述

心算中语音复述和计算加工交替进行,其中任何一方面落后都会导致心算困难。使用视觉心算成绩和听觉心算成绩相减的范式,研究计算能力正常但心算水平落后的儿童的语音复述水平。结果发现,不同年级心算困难儿童呈现不同的困难模式,2、4年级心算困难儿童语音复述水平正常,但由于语音工作记忆容量的落后,导致缺少足够的注意资源进行计算加工。3年级心算困难儿童在语音工作记忆容量和语音复述上都存在落后,导致心算困难,呈现出双重困难模式。