Investigates the role of operative schemes in explaining older children's superior memory on past Piagetian memory tasks. Contrasts were made between the performance of normal v learning disabled grade school children, and between preschool children who either possessed or lacked seriation schemes. (Author/SS)

Frontal lobe patients reproduced a sequence of capital letters or abstract shapes. Immediate and delayed reproduction trials allowed the analysis of short- and long-term memory for time order by means of suitable Markov chain stochastic models. Patients were as proficient as healthy subjects on the immediate reproduction trial, thus showing spared…

Children's attention to and comprehension of television programs were studied by comparing the effects of viewing continuous stories (i.e., those with meaningful plots brought to resolution) and magazine-format programs containing unrelated bits of entertainment. Effects of program pacing were also studied. Multiple programs, differing in content,…

A seriation task (assembling a set of nesting cups) was used in this study to examine developmental changes in young children's ability to restructure a situation. Forty young children, eight each at 18, 24, 30, 36, and 40 months of age, participated in the study. Each child was presented with five nesting cups and was told he or she could play…

Four experiments examined the effect of input sequence on memory for simple stories. After reading stories written in either chronological or flashback sequence, subjects made a decision about the underlying order of occurrence of two events. Responses were consistently faster and more accurate on chronological sequences under three conditions of…

Three experiments report additional evidence that it is a mistake to account for all interletter effects solely in terms of sensory variables. These experiments attest to the importance of structural variables such as retina location, array size, and ordinal position. (Author/PN)

Examined the hypothesis that good and poor readers would differ in their ability to order stimuli that can be easily recoded as words and stored in phonetic form, but not in their ability to order nonlinguistic stimuli that do not lend themselves to phonetic recoding in short-term memory. (Author/DB)

Children aged 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 years in three preschool programs were given a test battery consisting of classification, relations, and conservation tasks. One program (Ausubelian) was formal and two programs (Piagetian and Tradition) were informal. Posttest data for the first year of a three-year longitudinal study indicated significantly superior…

Demonstrated is a covariance principle that causes the observer to assume that if one aspect of a two-dimensional figure (its perimeter or its area) is conserved, the other aspect must also be conserved (pseudo-conservation). Mentally retarded individuals, assuming no such fixed relationship, correctly judged the changed state of the nonconserved…

To investigate reasoning capacities involved in learning to read, a Test of Multiple Seriation (from Piaget) was developed. Problems of a test used by Lunzer and Dolan are discussed. Results showed that word recognition and reading comprehension at age nine correlate significantly with multiple seriation, independent of IQ. (Editor/SJL)

Studied effectiveness of instruction in seriation and classification for kindergartners cognitively lagging behind their peers. Found that extensive classification and seriation instruction in a variety of formats was particularly helpful in facilitating cognitive gains for struggling kindergartners. Individualized instruction provided children…

Quantifies and confirms subjective impressions of similarity and differences in musical monophonic scores. Adapts concepts from sequence comparison theory and uses algorithms to define distances between any two melodies created by tone and rhythmic structure. Presents and applies a generalized algorithm for identifying locally similar portions in…

Single-task and dual-task versions of verbal and spatial serial order memory tasks were administered to 120 students tested for working memory capacity with four previously validated measures. In the dual-task versions, similarity between the memory material and the material of the secondary processing task was varied. With verbal material, three…

Two processes, serial and hierarchical, are generally opposed to account for grammatical encoding in language production. In a developmental perspective, the question addressed here is whether the subject-verb agreement during writing is computed serially, once the words are linearly ordered in the sentence, or hierarchically, as soon as the…

A total of 132 volunteer 10th and 11th grade students participated in an experiment to investigate two variables of computer-based adaptive instructional strategies for concept learning. The first variable tested the hypothesis that selection of number of examples according to on-task information is more efficient than selection according to…