Studies of orientation perception in infants and children have revealed an "oblique effect," that is, a performance advantage for tasks involving horizontal and vertical stimulus orientations compared with tasks involving oblique orientations. The two studies reported support the hypothesis that oblique stimulus orientations are treated…

In a classification task, preschoolers matched a target stimulus with a conventional category, a visually similar item that cut across conventional categories, or an unrelated item. Items were presented in picture, verbal, and picture-verbal conditions. In all conditions, conventional classifications outnumbered visual ones, and this difference…

The aims of this study were (1) to assess the relative effectiveness of verbal and visual elaboration prompts and question-answering prompts on children's incidental memory, and (2) to determine whether performance improvement associated with pictorial elaboration could be augmented by either verbal elaboration or question-answering procedures.…

Studies the allocation of attention of 100 four- and five-year-olds on a selective attention task. Results suggest that preschoolers are capable of using selective strategies when the task is made meaningful by the inclusion of a familiar script that provides supportive cognitive context. (RJC)

Measures of prenatal exposure in 123 infants to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), cord serum PCB level, and maternal report of contaminated fish consumption predicted less preference for a novel stimulus on Fagan's test of visual recognition memory (VRM) at 7 months. Preference for novelty decreased in a dose-dependent fashion and postnatal…

Infants were tested in three studies of the acquisition and long-term retention of category-specific information. Results document retention of category-specific information after intervals of two weeks. (PCB)

The incidental memory of young children was tested for words or words plus pictures that were initially presented under orienting conditions. These conditions required responses to acoustic or semantic qualities of the stimuli and an affirmative or negative response to the orienting questions. (PCB)

Two experiments investigated relationships between state anxiety, memory processes, and children's performance on problem-solving tasks. Participants were second and sixth graders in a private elementary school in Redlands, California. In both experiments, subjects responded to three training and eight test problems presented in the introtact…

A stages-of-learning model was used to examine effects of picture-word manipulation on storage and retrieval differences between disabled and nondisabled grade 2 and 6 children. Results showed that disabled students are poorer at memory tasks and in developing the ability to reliably retrieve information than nondisabled children. (Author/RH)

Experiments were conducted on the speed of encoding differences between 15 school-age individuals with and 15 individuals without mental retardation, while retaining a full memory load or half memory load. Subjects with mental retardation allocated fewer attentional resources to encoding, even though encoding may require more of their resources…

Two experiments examine the sorts of cues that might be available to facilitate children's ability to discriminate between memories for their own actions. Results suggest that the differences in discrimination performance demonstrate the importance of kinesthetic cues and visible consequences for children's memory discrimination. (Author/RWB)

Study looks at pigtailed macaque in the context of visual recognition problems adapted from a standardized test developed for use with human infants. Results demonstrate that the low-risk group easily differentiated novel from previously seen targets; the high-risk group gave no evidence of recognition. (Author/RWB)

Infant novelty scores correlated significantly with measures of cognitive outcome beginning at 24 months of age and continuing at 34, 40, and 72 months of age. Parental education was strongly correlated with cognitive outcome beginning at about two years of age. (RH)

To examine selective memorization in a scene context in which the expectancy of items was manipulated, preschool children, young adults, and older adults viewed a series of familiar scenes and were asked to remember one item from each. Results for children contrasted with the typical result of selective memorization research. (Author/RH)

Reports two experiments showing a possible developmental shift from memory organization based on associative criteria to an organization based on categorical criteria. Children in first, fourth, and seventh grades were given a sort/recall task with items that could be organized into groups of categorical or associative pairs. (Author/CB)