Thirty-six normal 5-year-olds and 60 educable mentally retarded (EMR) students with a mean age of 7 years were tested to determine whether specific formats of interrogatives would be instrumental in inducing the generation of effective verbal mediators. Ten EMR Ss and 6 normal Ss were tested on 21 paired associates in each six experimental…

Subjects, differing in imagery ability, learned a list of paired associates with the presence of a verbal context related to the stimulus item, with a pictorial context related to the stimulus item, or without the presence of any context. Following testing for recall, the subjects were required to learn one of two transfer lists. Both lists were…

The concepts in a hierarchically structured list consisting of 24 number-word pairs were aligned systematically with position and numbers, or with the number stimuli only. Some lists involved an alignment appropriate to only the lowest conceptual level. Other lists were completely unstructured when viewed in terms of either position or number. The…

To test a deduction from Carroll's Model of School Learning (i.e., increasing a learner's perserverance will not alter degree of learning or learning rate), time needed to learn a task under an encouragement condition designed to increase perserverance was compared to learning time under a discouragement condition. As predicted, no significant…

Three experiments compared congenitally blind and sighted adults and children on paired-associate, free-recall, and imaging tasks presumed to involve visual imagery in memory. In all three, blind subjects' performances were remarkably similar to the sighted. Results challenge previous explanations of performance such as Paivio's (1971). (Author/RD)

The kind of semantic information that facilitates relearning was investigated. The paradigm consisted of three stages: (1) learn a list of number-word pairs; (2) return for a retention test; and (3) relearn a new list of pairs that have various kinds of semantic relatedness to the originally learned pairs. (Author/CTM)

Differences between learning disabled and nonlearning disabled children's paired-associate learning can be eliminated by using instructional modifications. Procedures that reduce the "overloading" of the learning disabled students' cognitive processes have positive effects on associative learning. (CJ)

Four experiments examined priming between newly learned paired associates through two procedures, lexical decision and item recognition. Results argue against a functional separation of the semantic and episodic memory systems. (Author/AM)

This study evaluated eye-blink conditioning in 11 persons with autism (ages 11 to 22). Compared to matched controls, persons with autism learned the task faster but performed short-latency, high-amplitude conditioned responses. Results suggest this population has the ability to rapidly associate paired stimuli but may have impairments in…

We examined the wildlife knowledge of primary (aged 4-12) schoolchildren. In particular, we examined the effects of children's age and gender, as well as the taxonomy and origin (indigenous versus exotic) of wildlife, on the degree of knowledge about different species. We used illustrated "flashcards" of mammals, birds and arthropods,…

Artificial symbol-word correspondence in a simple paired associate learning task were used to determine whether disabled readers have a general problem dealing with complex and/or irregular rule systems. The performance of 36 normal readers and 36 disabled readers in grades 4 through 7 was compared. Disabled readers had IQ scores of 87 or above…

It was hypothesized that the use of fading in response items of stimulus-response pairs constructed to simulate learning of a foreign language vocabulary would result in fewer errors than would the use of regular flash cards used in typical trial-and-error fashion. Subjects were college women volunteers randomly assigned to one of two experimental…

Research suggests that when subjects are given a rule as to how to translate auditory or verbal information into images, the images have many common characteristics with cognitive representations derived from visual perceptions. This experiment examined the process of cognitive integration and the similarities and differences between how imagined…

In an investigation of the degree to which children learn associations in the direction opposite to the one in which they were taught, 20 preschool children were instructed in letter-sound correspondences in one of two ways. One group was presented with the letter symbol and asked to produce the sound, while the other group was presented with the…

In simultaneous learning two verbal lists are interlaced for study, with each tested separately. In the present experiments simultaneous learning was used as a means of determining the conditions under which study time or learning resources might be reallocated between lists. One of the lists was called the standard list and remained constant…