Über eine neue Methode zur psychologischen Untersuchung von Menschenaffen

Ohne ZusammenfassungMit Genehmigung der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften erscheint diese Mitteilung hier anstatt in ihren Berichten.     

Self‐paced study time as a cue for recall predictions across school age

Recent work on metacognition indicates that monitoring is sometimes based itself on the feedback from control operations. Evidence for this pattern has not only been shown in adults but also in elementary schoolchildren. To explore whether this finding can be generalized to a wide range of age groups, 160 participants from first to eighth grade participated in a study based on a self‐paced study time (ST) allocation paradigm. In contrast to previous studies, picture pairs instead of word pairs were used as stimuli to compensate for reduced reading skills in younger participants. Actual ST and judgments of learning (JOLs) made at the end of each study trial were used as core variables. The results are in line with previous findings, in that children's JOLs decreased with increasing ST, suggesting that JOLs were based on the memorizing effort heuristic that easily learned items are more likely to be remembered. Weaker inverse relationship between JOLs and ST was found for the younger children. Overall, these results underline the importance of mnemonic cues in shaping metacognitive feelings not only in adults but also in older children and expose a developmental trend in their use along childhood.     

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Maximum likelihood solution to factor analysis when some factors are completely specified

In the factor-analytic model, let some of the factors be known (i.e., the factor loadings are given in advance; they maye.g. be obtained from some previous analyses). However, their covariance matrix may, or may not, be known. The remaining factors (if any) are assumed to be uncorrelated among themselves and to the first set. For this model, the maximum likelihood equations are obtained and an iterative method for the solution is proposed.The work was done while the author was at Deutsches Rechenzentrum, Darmstadt, Germany.