This study examined the relative influence of observation, feedback in training seriation, and imitative motor activity in facilitating conceptual development. (CM)

A study involving four caregivers evaluated the effectiveness of a systematic instructional procedure known as constant time delay (CTD) in teaching caregivers how to use CTD to teach their adolescent or adult children, siblings, or clients with disabilities, response chain skills. Results found the procedure to be effective. (CR)

Several different issues in the temporal coding of words were subjected to experimental analysis. Two experiments evaluated three response measures (recency judgments, position judgments, lag judgments) used to index temporal coding. Lag judgments were found to be of little use; subjects could make valid position and recency judgments without…

Four experiments investigated the attentional requirements of learning as assessed by a serial reaction time task. The effects of a dual-task condition, plus the responses of memory disorder patients, were also investigated. The relationship between learning and awareness, preserved learning in amnesia, and the separateness of memory systems are…

Younger (age 20-35) veterans showed better performance on learning and psychomotor tasks than did older (age 55-70) veterans. Positive attitudes toward aging, and greater life satisfaction were associated with better performance on the behavioral tasks in the older group. Results suggest age-related behavior may be related to psychosocial…

Twenty normal children were administered three tests of auditory sequential memory. A Pearson product-moment correlation of .50 and coefficients of determination showed all but one relationship to be nonsignificant and predictability between pairs of scores to be poor. (Author)

The way that children construct the representation they use to solve transitive inference problems was examined. Forty-eight children 4.5 to 5 years old and 48 children 6 to 7 years old were asked to learn either a three-item series or a four-item nonseries. They were asked to learn the relationships between different colors of faces that were all…

The efficacy of small group instructional programs in classificatory, seriation, and combined class/series skills was evaluated for a sample of 60 urban, middle-class, 4- to 5-year-old children in a transfer of training design. Significant curriculum-specific transfer effects were found for the seriation instructional condition, whereas little…

In the first of three studies, separately reported, the effects of prompting and sequencing on a science concept task were studied with college students. The data analysis showed that the prompting procedure was significantly different from a no-prompting condition; prompting seemed to negate the affect of the defined concept instructional…

Tests 64 deaf students from oral and total communication settings to examine whether a deficiency in spontaneous strategy use accounts for their verbal short-term memory performance. Spontaneous rehearsal of both deaf samples seemed to emerge later than the hearing sample's and was inefficiently implemented and less effective in mediating recall…

The utility of a model of cognition for developing the coding strategies of mentally retarded persons was assessed with 20 moderately and severely retarded residents (mean age 15 years) of an institution. Correlational analyses confirmed the sequential processing nature of the training tasks, and the relationship between coding and language tests.…

Used a variance-partitioning procedure to identify age-related and age-invariant components of verbal and spatial memory span in 6- to 12-year olds. Concluded that verbal and spatial short-term memory appear to rely on similar processes when serial recall is required and that development in span is closely tied to increases in processing speed.…

This study examined the interrelationships among a number of episodic memory tasks and among various attributes of memory. A sample of 200 college students was tested for ten sessions; 28 different measures of episodic memory were obtained. In addition, five measures of semantic memory were available. Results indicated that episodic and semantic…

This study examined the use of supported employment to provide competitive janitorial work experience for a 19-year-old severely mentally handicapped student. Training consisted of a combination of total task presentation and an individualized prompting hierarchy. Results demonstrated acquisition and maintenance of all skills at 100 percent…

Mathematical performance by 14 first- and second-grade children with specific language impairments (SLI) indicated difficulty with mathematical tasks that required immediate response. Findings suggest that storage and/or retrieval of rote sequential material is difficult for children with SLI. (Author/PB)