Development of organization in recall: A stages-of-learning analysis

An experiment is reported in which the effects of taxonomic organization on 7-year-old and 11-year-old children's free and cued recall of two- and four-category lists were examined. The data were analyzed using a stages-of-learning model that simultaneously delivers estimates of the impact of these manipulations on storage and retrieval components of recall. The results indicated that for the Grade 2 children providing a category label at the time of recall primarily enhanced storage whereas increasing the number of categories primarily enhanced retrieval. For Grade 6 children, on the other hand, the use of category labels to cue recall primarily enhanced retrieval, whereas increasing the number of categories affected both storage and retrieval in free recall, but only retrieval in cued recall. In addition, while older children were superior to younger children at both storing and retrieving information, age differences at retrieval were generally larger than those at storage.     

Do children use similar processes to read and spell words?

The use of spelling-sound information in both reading and spelling was evaluated by having children read and spell nonwords and five types of words that differed in terms of their regularity for reading and spelling. The subjects were grade 3 children who had been psychometrically defined as good readers and good spellers (“good”), good readers and poor spellers (“mixed”), or poor readers and poor spellers (“poor”). Results indicated that all children attempted to use spelling-sound correspondences in both reading and spelling, although children in both the mixed and the poor groups had weaker knowledge of these correspondences and were less systematic in their use of them. Furthermore, even though the children in the mixed group had been matched with children in the good group on reading comprehension, the number and type of errors made by the mixed subjects on both the reading and spelling tasks were more similar to those of the poor subjects than to those of the good subjects.     

Three-state models of memory development: A review of advances in statistical methodology

A certain family of three-state Markov processes has been widely used in experiments on children's memory. Although the statistical machinery for these models is well developed in most respects, two shortcomings have been noted in recent literature reviews. First, the parameters of the models are not identifiable. Second, goodness-of-fit tests are laborious to execute and their sampling distributions are unknown. New procedures for dealing with these difficulties are reported.     

Control of children's observing responses by information feedback during visual discrimination learning

Four experiments examined the control of observing responses by information feedback during visual discrimination learning. Second-grade children participated in Experiment 1; kindergarten, second-, and fifth-grade children were subjects in Experiments 2 and 3, and grade 5 and adult subjects were tested in Experiment 4. In order to view the stimuli, subjects in Experiments 1, 2, and 3 activated lights in viewing boxes; in Experiment 4, stimulus fixations were measured using a corneal reflection technique. Fifth graders and adults observed the discriminative stimuli for longer times on trials following negative feedback than on trials following positive feedback; in contrast, kindergartener's observing was not affected by type of feedback. Second graders showed smaller and less reliable reactions to type of feedback than did older subjects. These results support the view that visual observing is controlled by cognitive processes associated with hypothesis testing.     

Memory and aging: Implications for theories of memory development during childhood

Research is reviewed suggesting that early school age children and older adults demonstrate a similar pattern of performance deficits (relative to the performance of young adults) on memory tasks, raising the possibility that age-related changes in some common factor might account for both memory development and memory decline. It is argued here that whereas “metamemory” theory of memory development does not provide a viable theory of memory decline, Craik's (F. I. M. Craik & M. Byrd, 1982, in F. I. M. Craik & S. E. Trehub (Eds.), Aging and cognitive processes, New York: Plenum; F. I. M. Craik & E. Simon, 1980, in L. W. Poon, J. L. Fozard, L. S. Cermak, D. Arenberg, & L. W. Thompson (Eds.), New directions in memory and aging, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum) attentional deficit theory of memory decline provides a viable theory of memory development as well. Evidence supporting this position is reviewed, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Visual dominance in inhibitory conditioning in the pigeon

In a conditioned inhibition paradigm (A+, B+, AX?_, pigeons received either of two keylight stimuli reliably followed by food (A+, B+). However, when one of these keylights was accompanied by another stimulus, food did not follow (AX?). For some groups, the putative inhibitor was a tone, whereas for others it was illumination of a red houselight. The birds pecked the A and B stimuli at a high rate. When X was red houselight, the birds pecked A at a much lower rate in the presence of X. When X was a tone, discrimination between A and AX was much poorer. Moreover, in a transfer test, red houselight inhibited responding to the other keylight, B, but tone did not. These results indicate that red houselight becomes a conditioned inhibitor more quickly than tone in appetitive situations, just as red houselight becomes a conditioned excitor more quickly in those situations. These results contradict the assertion that the latter outcome occurs because red houselight is a stronger appetitive excitor than tone at the start of the experiment (the “head start” hypothesis).     

Representation and retention of three-event sequences in pigeons

The present experiments studied a three-event delayed sequence-discrimination (DSD) task: one arrangement (order) of two stimuli (red and yellow overhead lights) taken three in succession (e.g., red, yellow, red) was the positive sequence and the remaining seven arrangements were the negative sequences for responding and reward during the subsequent test stimulus. In Experiment 1, the final stimulus (recency) and the order of stimuli in the positive sequence controlled acquisition of discrimination. In Experiment 2, increasing the duration of memory intervals between stimuli reduced the discriminability of those negative sequences identical to the positive sequence after the delay. Three-event DSD performance in Experiments 1 and 2 was similar to two-event DSD performance in comparable published experiments. Models developed to explain pigeon performance in two-event DSD were extended to the three-event task. Results from both two- and three-event versions of the DSD task falsified a noncumulative model and several cumulative integration models (i.e., adding, averging, and some multiplying models), but corroborated one cumulative, multiplying model.     

Evidence for scanning with unilateral visual presentation of letters

When letters and words are presented tachistoscopically, material from the right visual field (RVF) can be reported more accurately than that from the left visual field (LVF). The RVF superiority may reflect either left hemispheric dominance for language or directional scanning. Previous studies have deliberately focused on the cerebral asymmetry factor while "controlling" scanning and, thus, have cast some doubt on the potency of the scanning factor. Two experiments were conducted to show that scanning can induce a RVF superiority comparable to that often associated with cerebral asymmetry. The first experiment required bilingual subjects to report six English or six Hebrew letters, shown briefly in either the LVF or RVF, with order of report controlled. A RVF superiority found with English characters was matched by an equal but opposite LVF effect with Hebrew. In a second experiment, five English characters were shown briefly in either the LVF or RVF, and subjects had to identify a single character indicated by a post exposural cue. Using a spatial cue to by pass scanning, there were no field differences; with an ordinal position cue--a procedure thought to force scanning--there was a strong RVF superiority. The results show clearly that scanning can induce visual field differences.     

Concept learning,memory and transfer of dot pattern categories

In the first experiment, subjects rated the similarity of a sample of pairs of random dot patterns generated from 3 prototypes consisting of either 4, 6, or 9 dots. The results of the experiment tended to confirm the structure imposed on the patterns by the construction method. In the second experiment, subjects learned to classify random patterns generated from 2 prototypes with either short or long interprototype distance and consisting of either 4, 6, or 9 dots in a traditional concept identification task. After acquisition, memory for old and new distortions and the prototype, which was not presented during learning, was assessed. The tendency to call a pattern “new” increased with the distance between the pattern and its prototype. In a subsequent transfer test, all subjects saw patterns of either 4, 6, or 9 dots. Performance was above chance and the transfer from larger to smaller patterns tended to be greater than the transfer from smaller to larger patterns. This is consistent with a process of schema formation based on features common to most exemplars of the category. The results are discussed in relation to several theories of concept learning and schema abstraction.