A skilled cognitive theorist might help behaviorists resolve inconsistencies found from their experimentation with imaginal mnemonics in paired-associate and serial learning tasks. Iconic cognition which relegates verbal processes to short-term storage and output systems is inadequate to explain the verbal coding and elaboration processes…

Using 48 educable mentally handicapped students (ages 12-18) as subjects, a study investigated the effect of prompted and trial-and-error procedures on the learning of a paired-associate task, when items (concrete nouns of less than six letters) in one list were drawn from the same categories (animals, food) and in a second list, from different…

Rote learning and retention performance was studied as a function of method used in original learning and as a function of intellectual level. Sixty educable mentally retarded and 60 mentally normal junior high school students were randomly selected and assigned to one of three treatment groups, each learning to a different criterion, for each…

The effect of presentation time on learning under varying mediation instructions demonstrated a time-dependent difference in the facilitating effect of imagery generation or sentence generation instructions. Subjects were junior high school students working in a paired associate task with concrete nouns. Both cognitive strategies were more…

This study was designed to investigate the functional similarity of the mental processes children use to learn verbal tasks and pictorial tasks. Children in grades 3 and 6 (n=144) and in grade 9 (n=112) were given four short paired-associate tasks entitled Pictures, Concrete Words, Abstract Words, and Japanese Characters. The tasks consisted of…

A three-way design was used to assess the effect of imagery instructions in noun-pair learning. The three principal factors were instructions (imagery versus rehearsal versus control), presentation mode (words versus pictures), and grade (1, 3, 6, and 11). Sixty subjects were drawn from each grade and randomly assigned to the six conditions.…

Two methodological issues involved in determining the relationship between learning and general intelligence were examined: (1) the use of learning strategies in a paired-associate task and (2) the importance of time (rather than errors) in the measurement of learning efficiency. (Author/RD)

Aptitude by treatment interactions are investigated in the context of paired associate learning. Individuals are grouped by preference for visual or verbal items on classifying lists of paired associates and these groups are used to predict performance on criterion lists. (DG)

Highly skilled and less skilled readers read words and numbers aloud as rapidly as possible. Less skilled readers were slower and less accurate on both tasks showing that the need to encode and process order information may be related to reading disabilities. This hypothesis was tested by using paired-associate learning. (Author/RD)

A group of eight mildly intellectually handicapped adolescents at a work preparation center were taught to read two lists of words of equal difficulty by different methods--using an autoinstructional device (a 3M sound-on-slide projector) and a more traditional paired-associate method. (Author/SBH)

Three studies were performed to investigate the effects of training versus instructions in the acquisition of cognitive learning strategies. Groups of undergraduate students were taught to use one or more strategies. The amount and type of training differed for each of the experimental groups. Strategies taught included the method of loci,…

This study investigated developmental differences in the use of the common features abstraction strategy and the exemplar learning strategy for concept acquisition. Subjects were 30 second graders and 30 fifth graders. The concepts to be learned were two categories of artificial animals which differed on five dimensions. Each dimension had three…

This study was the first in a series of investigations designed to examine techniques purporting to enhance the effectiveness of human memory. The utility of a simple pegword mnemonic for Army enlisted personnel, representing three levels of general technical ability, was examined. Half of each ability group was instructed in use of a rhyme…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of drawing training on the paired-associate learning of lower- and middle-class kindergarten-age children where learning materials consisted of simultaneously presented pictures, successively presented pictures, or successively presented aural nouns. Subjects were 84 kindergarten children, half from two Title…

This research on factors influencing verbal learning and retention has used new techniques, attacked new problems, and tested new theories while trying to keep the experiments systematic. Studies conducted involved (1) the effect of varying the length of the intertrial interval on the learning and retention of different types of learning tasks;…