Evidence for a developmental shift in the basis for memory organization

Using a false recognition procedure, either with or without instructions to facilitate Synonym or Antonym encoding, 128 second- and sixth-grade boys and girls were tested. The results indicated that there were no grade or sex differences in generalization errors to synonyms or antonyms under neurtral learning instructions, but that facilitative instructions interacted with grade level. Under instructions to facilitate synonym encoding, second graders showed a marked increase in synonym errors. On the other hand, under instructions to facilitate antonym encoding, sixth graders showed an increase in antonym errors. In addition, association strength was directly related to the magnitude of the generalization errors in both grades. The results are discussed in terms of age-related shifts in the basis underlying the organization of verbal memories.     

The perception of consistency in attitudes

A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that when people change their attitudes they reduce the dissonance associated with the inconsistency of their new and previous positions by distorting their recall of their initial stand to make it consistent with their new attitude. Small groups of high school students discussed bussing, one of 30 pretested issues. An experimental confederate participated in each session with the task of effecting attitude change. After the discussion, the subjects' new attitudes were assessed and they were asked to duplicate their pretest scores. The results confirmed the hypothesis. Subjects distorted their recall of their initial stand on bussing so as to make it consistent with their new attitude. Such distortion allows persons to feel that their new position is the one they have always held. The subjects made such recall errors only on the bussing issue. Control subjects did not distort their original bussing attitudes.     

Perceptions of the magnitude and diversity of social support

Three studies were conducted to test the hypotheses that subjects would overestimate the proportion of their peers who shared their opinion on an issue and that they would perceive their own opinion group as consisting of people with a wider and more diverse range of values and outlooks than those holding different opinions. The first study was conducted following a period of intense debate about sixism on a college campus. Subjects estimated student opinion on issues related to sexism and indicated how diverse or similar they perceived supporters and nonsupporters of the women's movement to be. In a second study subjects estimated the proportion of students who evaluated President Carter's performance as good, fair, or poor and then indicated how diverse or similar the three groups of students were who held these various opinions. A third study closely replicated the second, using the issue of divestiture of college-owned stock in South Africa. In all three studies, subjects were divided into groups on the basis of their own attitudes. Results consistently supported the hypotheses.     

Patterns of EEG alpha during word processing and relations to recall

EEG alpha activity was monitored during word presentation in a single trial cued-recall task. Initial post-word changes in alpha were related to a dimension of word meaning (arousal-neutral) while subsequent alpha asymmetry was a function of encoding instructions (verbal or visual). Initial bilateral reductions in alpha were associated with increased recall, but subsequent asymmetry in alpha was not. The results suggest a two stage pattern of cortical activation associated with memory storage processes.     

The attribution of friendliness

A study was conducted to explore attributions of friendliness resulting from live interaction. Subjects had either one or two encounters with a confederate whose behavior in each encounter was either friendly or unfriendly and was either spontaneous or forced by role requirements. Single encounter subjects formed impressions of the confederate that reflected the friendliness or unfriendliness of the confederate's behavior but these impressions were not modified by their knowledge that the confederate's behavior was freely chosen or forced. The same was true for subjects who had two friendly or two unfriendly interactions with the confederate. Subjects who found the confederate to be friendly in one encounter and unfriendly in the other formed impressions that took into account the causes of the confederate's behaviors. In general, these subjects modified their impressions according to the cause of the confederate's behavior in the second encounter.     

Homonym understanding and conservation

It is proposed that a common cognitive capacity underlies both homonym understanding and conservation ability—namely, the capacity to shift attention from one dimension (domain) to another. This hypothesis is tested in a longitudinal study of kindergarten (mean age 6-0) and first-grade (mean age 6-6) children. The results indicate that conservation status is significantly related to homonym understanding, over and above the age or general vocabulary level of the child.     

The effects of cueing and constraint instructions on children's free recall performance

The performance of nursery school children was investigated in two experiments involving cued and constrained free recall. Under constrained instructions, subjects were required to recall items by category. Under cued instructions subjects could recall items in any order they wished but the organized nature of the lists was identified and subjects were told that they would remember more if they recalled things from the same category together. No effects of cueing instructions were obtained in either Experiment I or Experiment II. Constrained recall instructions led to enhanced recall and category clustering. However, the beneficial effects were not maintained on later trials with the same list or on a transfer list when the constraints on recall were dropped. In addition, the introduction of constrained recall instructions had identical effects whether they were introduced early or late in practice. The results were discussed in terms of the influences of variables which affect the subjects' use of retrieval strategies and the development of memory.     

Effects of a concurrent memory task on hemispheric asymmetries in categorization

Recent research on the division of processing between the two cerebral hemispheres has often employed two concurrent tasks to investigate the dynamic nature of hemispheric asymmetries. The experiment reported here explored the effects of two concurrent high-level cognitive tasks (memory retention and semantic categorization) on the direction and magnitude of hemispheric differences in the processing of words and pictures. Subjects were required to categorize words and pictures presented to either the left visual field-right hemisphere (LVF-RH) or the right visual field-left hemisphere (RVF-LH). The categorization could be performed while holding either verbal material in memory (digit span), pictorial material in memory (serial nonsense figure recognition), or with no concurrent memory task. The effects produced hemisphere-specific, material-nonspecific interference. The verbal task removed a RVF-LH advantage at word categorization and enhanced a LVF-RH advantage on picture categorization; the pictorial task interfered with picture categorization in the LVF-RH, while enhancing a RVF-LH advantage at word categorization. The results are discussed in terms of multiple resource models of hemisphere function, capacity limitations, and the functional locus of processing required to produce various dynamic hemispheric effects.     

Arousal transfer: The influence of fear arousal on subsequent sexual arousal for subjects with high and low sex guilt

Male subjects (N = 128) with high or low sex guilt either were or were not threatened with shock (fear arousal manipulation) and then viewed either an erotic or a neutral film (sex arousal manipulation). Then all subjects viewed and rated slides of attractive women and slides of landscapes (neutral control slides). If fear arousal was specifically transferred to sexual arousal as is often predicted rather than simply causing a general increase in arousal, then it would be expected that subjects who had been exposed to the threat would show high arousal in response to the slides of women and low arousal to the slides of landscapes, whereas subjects who had not been threatened would show low arousal to both the slides of women and landscapes. Physiological (pulse rate, skin resistance), self-report, and word association measures consistently indicated that (a) both of the arousal manipulations were effective, (b) the slides of women were arousing, (c) sex guilt influenced responses as would be expected from previous research, but (d) did not indicate support for arousal transference. These findings (a) provide information concerning the influence of guilt on drives, (b) raise questions about the transfer of arousal that was noted in less controlled investigations, and (c) highlight the need for additional controls in research of this type.     

Developmental differences in recall and recognition: The relationship between rehearsal and memory as test expectation changes

An overt rehearsal procedure was used to study the relationship between children's rehearsal strategies and their memory performance under different conditions of test expectation. Previous work has shown that developmental differences in rehearsal content affect recall performance. This study was designed to address the question of why active rehearsal content results in superior recall performance. The equivalence of recognition-memory performance for third- (age 9) and sixthgraders (age 12) suggests that developmental differences in recall are due to the effects of rehearsal content on item retrieval from permanent memory. In addition, the data indicate that third- and sixth-graders can differentiate between expected recall and recognition tests and, with the exception of the sixth-grade boys, use this information to modify their rehearsal content. These differences in rehearsal content, as a function of the type of test expected, corresponded to changes in recall performance.     

Children's understanding of sentences with contingent relations: Why are temporal and conditional connectives so difficult?

Children aged 5-, 7-, and 9 were tested on two different tasks to assess their understanding of sentences containing the connectives “when,” “as soon as,” “before,” “after,” “if,” “if-not,” “unless,” and “unless-not.” The results revealed significant improvement between the ages of 5 and 7. This improvement was attributed, in part, to an increased ability to retain information expressed in subordinate clauses. At all age levels, however, the connectives “unless” and “unless-not” were consistently misinterpreted; “unless” was treated as its polar opposite “if,” and “unless-not” was treated as its polar opposite “if-not.”     

Free recall in boys of normal and poor reading levels as a function of task manipulations

Free recall of reading disabled boys, ages 9 to 11 years, was compared with that of boys showing no reading difficulty. During a baseline trial, poor readers recalled less items and tended to show less recall organization than normals. Recall and category clustering in a second trial were highest following a manipulation designed to produce semantic encoding of items and lowest when children were required to focus on items' physical features. In a condition requiring free sort prior to recall, reading disabled boys failed to organize or study as effectively as normals. Rather than lacking the ability to use semantic relations as a strategy for grouping items, the reading disabled had difficulty in spontaneously generating effective study techniques.     

Retrieval processes in recall

A reaction time (RT) paradigm was developed to study retrieval processes in paired associate (PA) recall. Prior to the experimental session, subjects learned lists of PAs (varying in length from three to 24 pairs); during the experimental session, subjects' RT to say the response word from the onset of a visually presented stimulus word was measured. The implications of several classes of retrieval models were discussed in the context of this paradigm. The shape of the RT-list length function, practice, and sequential effects were all of interest in distinguishing among models. Four experiments were reported which were designed to (1) establish the baseline effects in this paradigm, (2) determine which of these effects should be attributed to the retrieval stage of processing, and (3) investigate the effect of semantic memory in this task. Results suggest that simple serial scanning models are inadequate to handle the data from this task. Strength, direct-access, or parallel processing models, on the other hand, seem to capture the qualitative effects present in our experiments. When a strength model was formalized and fit to the data from Experiment I, it was found that a two-trace version gave good quantitative fits while a one-trace version did not, suggesting that both short- and long-term memory independently contribute in this task.     

Prototypicality and personality: Effects on free recall and personality impressions

An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that it is easier to process information about characters who fit well with and are, therefore, “prototypical” of shared beliefs about various personality types. Character prototypicality was manipulated in a free recall and personality impression paradigm through variations in the consistency of a character's identification with preexisting beliefs about two personality-type categories—extraversion and introversion. Subjects also were given information about each character that varied in degree of abstraction from traits to concrete behavior. As predicted, both the amount and nature of the information correctly recalled were significantly affected by the consistency of the character's identification with extraversion or with introversion. Character consistency also significantly affected the amount of material written in the personality impressions and the tendency to qualify the generality of the impressions. The results support a model in which incoming data about personality are coded, structured, elaborated, and remembered according to the quality of their match with preexisting beliefs about various personality types.     

Multivariate relationships between measures of learning style and memory

Three self-report instruments assessing “learning style” were administered to 106 undergraduate students: the Inventory of Learning Processes, the Study Behavior Questionnaire, and the Learning Style Inventory. Performance measures on word list and prose learning tasks were also obtained using both immediate and delayed retention tests. Canonical correlation analysis of the pairs of learning style instruments indicated that there was a small to moderate amount of overlapped variance. Inspection of the canonical variates revealed that what overlap existed was generally due to a common factor related to the depth of processing conception of memory. No significant canonical correlations were obtained between any of the learning style instruments and word list retention measures. However, the Inventory of Learning Processes and the Learning Style Inventory each obtained one significant canonical correlation with the set of prose retention measures. There was little overlap between sets of retention measures derived separately from prose and word list tasks. The findings have implications concerning (a) the validity and equivalency of available self-report instruments assessing learning style, (b) the role of the learning task in studying individual differences in learning and memory processes, and (c) the assessment of “depth of processing” at the level of individual differences.     

The influence of attention upon anticipatory arousal,habituation, and reactivity to a noxious stimulus

Forty subjects were assigned to four groups, an External-attending Group, an Internal-attending Group, a Control Group, and a Distracted Group. All groups were presented with six trials of a 0.5-sec 110-db white noise. A measure of heart rate deceleration verified the experimental manipulation of attention. During the anticipatory period, the Internal-attending Group exhibited the greatest and the Distracted Group exhibited the least reactivity among the four groups. The two specially attending groups exhibited greater galvanic skin-response conditioning during the anticipatory period than the other groups. There was no support for the hypothesis that heightened attention facilitates habituation. Two measures were differentially sensitive to direction of attention during the anticipatory period. The External-attending Group exhibited reliably greater anticipatory deceleration of heart rate than the Internal-attending Group, while the Internal-attending Group exhibited reliably more nonspecific electrodermal responses than the External-attending Group. This latter finding, along with other evidence, suggests that an inward direction of attention tends to exacerbate anticipatory anxiety as well as reactivity to the impact of a noxious stimulus.     

Recognition versus recall of briefly presented visual information: a developmental study.

Five-year-olds, as compared to adults, have displayed a striking constraint on short-term recognition memory for briefly presented visual information. In the present study, a recall paradigm was also examined to test the generality of this constraint. Additionally, we examined the possibility that forced verbal report might differentially enhance children's performance. Evidence of improved performance in children would suggest that a verbal encoding strategy, used by adults only during the recognition task, is activated in children in a recall task. Though recall memory performance of young children did surpass recognition memory levels, the same was true for adults with the relative adult-child difference remaining constant across conditions. It was concluded that processes other than verbal labeling (e.g., buffer storage, organization, retrieval) are probably more responsible for age differences in immediate memory performance than labeling, per se.     

Instrumental learning in preschool children as a function of type of task, type of reward, and some organismic variables

The effects on instrumental behavior of differences in type of task, type of reward and three organismic variables were investigated in preschool children. The main results were that: (a) an imitative task was acquired in fewer trials than a nonimitative task; (b) social reward in acquisition led to greater resistance to extinction; (c) a history of frequent social reinforcement from peers led to persistence in responding during extinction for boys only; (d) extraversion was found to interact with the variables of task and reward in errors made during extinction; and (e) intelligence was not found to be a reliable predictor of main acquisition and extinction measures or related errors. Detailed analysis of the different types of errors contributed directly to the interpretation of these findings.     

Picture superiority in free recall: The effects of organization and elaboration

A conception of semantic memory structure is presented in which elaboration is considered to vary both between and within items. Pictures and their verbal labels are suggested to activate common abstract memory representations, but these activations will differ in their degree of within-item elaboration. However, pictures and words should show comparable between-item elaboration properties, such as might be revealed by the category-recall relationship and clustering in free recall. Children were presented pictures and words in either a category-recall situation, where between-item elaboration was emphasized, or in a control situation where between-item elaboration was minimized. No differences between pictures and words in either recall or clustering were found in the category-recall task. However, when the same items were presented in the control situation the typical picture superiority effect in free recall was found. The results are interpreted as consistent with a two-factor theory of semantic elaboration, and indicate that these basic properties of memory encoding hold even for young children.     

The effects of attention-directing training on recognition memory task performance of three-year-old children

Thirty-eight 3-year-old children served as subjects in an investigation of recognition memory in which schematic faces differing only in the orientation of the eyes were employed as stimuli. A pretest was administered to all children, after which the two experimental groups received training in either attention to the distinctive feature of the training stimuli (also schematic faces) by means of a matching task, or in labeling the faces according to how they looked (sleepy, happy, sad, mad) and in using the labels to perform a matching task. After the training session all children were given a posttest on recognition memory of the faces. The verbally trained group obtained significantly higher scores on the posttest than either the feature or control groups. These results indicate that although the children were able to discriminate the faces, evidenced in their ease of performance on the training tasks, they were not able to use this knowledge unless given training in attaching labels to the stimuli, which enabled them to store the information for later use. Results are discussed in light of Gibson's (1969) theory of the developmental interrelations of cognitive processes.