The issue of whether information to which little or no attention is paid can have lasting effects is of interest to psychologists as well as educators and advertisers. Two experiments were designed to examine whether focused attention is required, whether the immediate memory task is important, or whether subjects' knowledge that repetitions are…

Cognitive psychologists believe that knowledge is multifaceted and that people process more than just semantic content from a stimulus array. To investigate the implications of recall and impression formation processing objectives on the representation of serial order in memory and judgment, subjects participated in two recall and impression…

A set of studies investigated the relative importance of operative schemes and figurative (rote) memory. In Study I, 60 concrete operational children from grades 1-4 were asked to reconstruct two types of stimuli from memory. In order to separate the effects of operative and figurative skill use, learning disabled children with poor figurative…

This study investigates (1) the relationship of two potentially valuable measures of sequential processing to each other and to a measure of digit span, and (2) the relationships among tests of sequential processing and other measures of cognitive functioning. Subjects were 188 first grade students who had been screened in kindergarten for risk of…

Forty-eight grade-three children and 48 grade-eight children were presented respectively with six- and eight-letter sequences for written free recall. The older children, as had adult subjects in previous studies, showed a greater tendency to recall serially with a four-letters-per-second presentation rate than with a half- or…

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)

This study focused on the issue of whether "scripts" guide children's comprehension and recall of stories. Two groups of kindergarten and second-grade children (N=48) from middle class elementary school districts were told two stories about typical events in the life of a young child (eating dinner and going to bed). Children were asked to recall…

Two experiments which investigated the young child's ability to deal with multiplicative classes and relations (considered behavioral indices of concrete operations thought) in double series and cross class matrices are described and discussed. In the initial study, 160 children from preschool through grade 2 received six matrix subtasks…