Habituation of looking time has become the standard method for studying cognitive processes in infancy. This method has a long history and derives from the study of memory and habituation itself. Often, however, it is not clear how researchers make decisions about how to implement habituation as a tool to study processes such as categorization,…

Comments on a study by Schacter and others which proposes that insights into why infants make the AB error can be gained by examining the errors of brain-damaged adults on similar tasks. (The B in AB has a line over it in the title and in the article meaning "A not B.") (PCB)

The study evaluated the semantic system of mentally retarded adults (N=32) to determine whether they encode information in semantic memory on the dimensions of item prototypicality and list organization. Results suggested that interference effects inhibited encoding by organization and typicality. (DB)

Emphasizes the social and interpersonal aspects of actions, especially as described in Soviet psychology. Argues that remembering is essential for intentional action. Intentional action is derived from the communication and cooperative relations between two people. (RH)

Assesses children's recall performance using three memory instructions: standard free recall, repetition, and categorical processing. Recall performance was about equal for standard versus repetition and superior when category processing is used, especially with highly representative items. Concludes that at both 7 years and 10 years the…

The specificity of memories has been identified as a factor affecting reality monitoring performance. To examine the reality monitoring model of Johnson and Raye (1981) and to explore the relationship between memory specificity and reality monitoring, the amount of cognitive operations involved in processing information was manipulated for 72…

Priming is a nonconscious form of human memory. Presents evidence and reasoning that priming and perceptual identification are expressions of a single perceptual representation system. (YP)

A review of the literature on attribution theory suggests that attributional templates may be similar to balanced structures, in that they are cognitive constructs that have an organizing influence on thought processes and exert a similar organizational influence on the memory for social information. Therefore, the three basic attributional…

Presents several reconceptualizations of adult cognitive development and its relation to everyday problem solving. Argues that investigation of relations between adult cognitive development and everyday problem solving may be facilitated through causal modeling that includes task characteristics, social context, and personality and motivational…

Reports that both learning-disabled (LD) and non-learning-disabled (NORM) children recalled disproportionately more adjacent words than semantically related or spaced words in a free recall task. Spaced words were less likely to be recalled by the younger children and by the LDs. NORMs' recalls were governed by purposive semantic processing to a…

This study compared students with (n=20) and without (n=40) learning disabilities (LD) on their recall of academic information and information encountered in their everyday lives. Students with LD performed poorly on both types of recall, suggesting that they may have problems with retrieval and working memory. The availability of cues…

This study with 16 adolescents with mental retardation compared free-recall rates under two encoding conditions: (1) fade-in, initially presenting pictures out of focus then slowly fading them into focus; and (2) fade-out, slowly blurring originally clear pictures. Results indicated that free-recall rates were greater for the fade-in items for…

This study examined conceptual relationships in semantic memory using an indirect priming technique in high-functioning autistic adolescents and controls. The autistic subjects and controls showed similar semantic priming effects. However, correlations with nonverbal cognitive measures for the autistic subjects suggests that semantic processing in…

The research study investigated the memory and metamemory abilities of four severely to profoundly deaf students with bilateral sensory-neural loss, between the ages of 9 and 20 years. Metamemory was investigated with four modified subtests identified as "story list,""study plan,""retrieval event," and "opposites-arbitrary." Encoding was…

Much research has found that information encoded according to its self-relevance is more easily recalled than information encoded according to other formats. Two experiments were conducted to examine potential moderators of the processes involved in self-relevant memory. In the first study, the hypothesis was tested that self-relevant encoding is…