A central goal of research on short-term memory (STM) over the past 2 decades has been to identify the mechanisms that underpin the representation of serial order, and to establish whether these mechanisms are the same across different modalities and domains (e.g., verbal, visual, spatial). A fruitful approach to addressing this question has…

Correct counting respects the stable order principle whereby the count terms are recited in a fixed order every time. The 4 experiments reported here tested whether precounting infants recognize and prefer correct stable-ordered counting. The authors introduced a novel preference paradigm in which infants could freely press two buttons to activate…

Shows that the construction of mental representations that capture a situation based on the comprehension of a diagram are mediated by the possession of appropriate background knowledge. Indicates that background knowledge deficiencies may make it difficult for beginning students of a domain to construct suitable mental representations from…

Earlier versions of the four papers presented in this collection formed a symposium, "Children's Interactions with Television," at the 1982 International Congress of Applied Psychology in Edinburgh. In the first paper, "Children's Comprehension of Television Programs," Peter Rendell and Mary Nixon describe a study which…