Learners typically allocate more resources to learning items that are higher in value than they do to items lower in value. For instance, when items vary in point value for learning, participants allocate more study time to the higher point items than they do to the lower point items. The current experiments extend this research to a context where…

The study is based on the assumption that certain noncognitive factors influence the learning process, and attempts to tentatively isolate what such variables might be. Subjects were 93 students enrolled in a General Psychology course. Each completed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and was then assigned randomly to one of 4 treatment groups: (1)…

The purpose of this study was to (1) compare the semantic relationships among common nouns obtained via two different measurement procedures and (2) determine if the use of these relationships to classify the various words results in differential degrees of learning when the stimuli are cast in terms of the paired-associate learning paradigm.…

The deep structure description of a sentence marks the actual grammatical relationships that exist among the words. It is in the deep structure that "meaning" is rendered. Two sentences that are marked differently in deep structure might give rise to the same description in surface structure. Three experiments examined the "psychological reality"…

In two separate paired-associate learning experiments each employing 40 university students as subjects, the contribution of individual differences (IDs) in arousal to short- and long-term retention was investigated using IDs in salivary response to lemon juice stimulation as an index of arousal. Experimental subjects were pre-selected out of 184…

This research contrasts the learning effects of an affective dimension of meaningfulness with the word-quality of consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams. Subject rated trigrams for both "association value"--having word-quality versus lacking word-quality--and "reinforcement value"--liking versus disliking the trigram regardless of word quality. Paired…