Memory for common objects: brief intentional study is sufficient to overcome poor recall of US coin features

Prior studies have explained the very poor recall for the features of a coin in terms of visual characteristics. Two experiments compared incidental exposure and intentional study of US coins on recall of their features. In Experiment 1, recall performance for a rarely seen Mercury dime after a 1-min study period was better than that for an unstudied penny, even when the test on the dime was delayed 1 week. In Experiment 2, participants studied the dime for 15, 30, 45, or 60 s. Recall of the dime was greater than that of the unstudied penny even with the shortest study interval. Thus, a high level of recall of a coin's features can be obtained with brief intentional study, and that level can be maintained across a long delay interval. These findings suggest that poor retention of coin features is due to incidental exposure rather than to visual characteristics. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sequencing in social repair: A Markov grammar of children's discourse about transgressions

A Markov grammar was developed to account for the sequence of conversational moves in discourse about transgressions. This discourse interrupts ongoing activity and functions to repair the social fabric when inappropriate or awkward behavior has attracted the attention of interactants. A corpus of 1248 such interchanges, obtained in 90 hr of observation in kindergarten through fourth grade classrooms, was the basis of the grammar. Beginning with theoretical assumptions about the canonical form of these interchanges, the process of grammar development was explicitly described and the direction given by pragmatic considerations (such as attaining a balance between parsimony and accuracy) was discussed. The resultant grammar accounted for 83% of the corpus and served as a framework within which age and context effects on the discourse were explored. Loglinear analyses of multiway contingency tables at each transition point in the grammar revealed that the presence vs absence of an adult in the interchange affected the relative preferences for different alternatives at one juncture, but that subjects' ages did not influence the sequencing of discourse as described by the model. The overall approach was considered in relation to the more traditional uses of Markov models and its strengths, weaknesses, and future promise for discourse analysis were discussed.     

Acquisition and retention of a letter-detection skill

In two experiments, we examined the acquisition and retention of a letter-detection skill with a consistent-mapping procedure. In Experiment 1, subjects were trained from 0 to 4 sessions at detecting the letter H in displays containing random letters, and retesting occurred after a 1-month delay. Performance improved and in some cases became more automatic, and the performance level was maintained over the retention interval. When tested with a prose passage, the high error rate on the word THE was eliminated after training and after the retention interval, regardless of the amount of training. In Experiment 2, two subjects were given 12 sessions of training followed by a retention test 6 months later. For 1 subject there was also a retention test 15 months after acquisition. Performance improved dramatically with training, and substantial but not complete automaticity was achieved. Performance on the retention tests was close to the final acquisition level. The surprising lack of forgetting in this study was contrasted with the substantial forgetting typically found in studies of verbal learning.