This study, involving adults with and without mental retardation and mental age-matched children, employed a lateralized presentation of Stroop color words, neutral words, and the subject's first name. Individuals with mental retardation experienced difficulty in effortful processing (inhibiting the reading response on the Stroop trials) and in…

Visual scanning patterns of 17 students with mental retardation and control groups matched for chronological or mental age were recorded during visuomotor tasks. Results suggested that subjects paid more attention to penpoints than to the succeeding or passed points of a model line, indicating that they have a poorer ability to process more than…

Analysis of 22 mean response times (RTs) for children with specific language impairment (SLI) found that SLI children's RTs increased linearly as a function of RTs for age-matched non-SLI control children. Intergroup differences in processing speed between children with and without SLI reflect some general component of cognitive processing.…

Two experiments involving 65 college students support the hypothesis that, when students read about a familiar topic, they use a reinstatement-and-integration strategy in which familiar knowledge is retrieved from long-term memory along with some information about the original context in which facts were learned. (SLD)

Tests of rapid serial naming, reading, spelling, general intelligence, articulation speed, and word fluency were administered to nine children with reading disabilities and rapid serial naming difficulties. Follow up 9 years later showed that difficulties in rapid naming, reading, and spelling persisted. The development of naming speed is…

Discusses the article by Lewis in this issue in the context of complex systems theory. Reviews several concepts of complex systems theory, including self-organization, entropy, phase transitions, stochastic processes, nonlinearity, and attractors. Notes that Lewis highlights the need for psychological models to treat nonlinear processes, chaotic…

To assess changes in processing speed in the second and third years of life, 2 sequential visual events were shown to 22-, 27-, and 32-month-old children, 12 at each age. Response clusters indicated that speed of processing increased with age and that a proactive inhibition declined with age. (SLD)

Investigates the management of expertise in advice-giving in the calls to a radio advice line. Analyzes how the expert's talk handles the tension between the personal and public dimensions of advice-giving in such a public forum. (HB)

Argues that anticipating communication has cognitive tuning effects such that individuals think descriptively and entertain a greater variety of thoughts when they anticipate receiving information, but think valuatively and avoid information searches when they perceive they will primarily convey rather than receive information in a forthcoming…

Examined association of individual differences in physical maturation with information-processing speed among 9- and 10-year olds. Found that early maturers were faster than late matureres, although this maturity effect was primarily the result of a significant effect for boys. The early maturers' faster processing times may be specific to boys or…

The memory abilities of adults (N=20) with Down Syndrome (DS) were compared to subjects matched on age and IQ and on age alone. Three memory tasks were employed: facial recognition, free recall of pictures and words, and cued recall of separate or interacting pictures. In DS individuals, memory was improved primarily by practice and interactive…

Discusses connectionist techniques that can be used for modeling perception, memory, and language processing, concentrating on a class of network with dual-weight connections in which each connection has both short- and long-term weight and describes a novel architecture in which the short- and long-term weights are independent. (45 references)…

Surface and relational similarity were examined in two experiments involving isomorphic and nonisomorphic analogical transfer, using direct-mapping and cross-mapping conditions. In the first experiment, third and sixth graders exhibited mapping based on relational similarity more frequently than did kindergartners; in the second, most four- to…

Two studies examined whether sustained attention during object exploration reflects more active cognitive processing than do other attention components. One study suggested that length of infants' examining is related to the amount of information to be processed. The other showed infants were less distractible during examining, suggesting that…

Reviews Karmiloff-Smith's "Beyond Modularity," suggesting that her work highlights phenomena that seem counter intuitive when regarded from current developmental frameworks, and advocates that understanding them requires more complex perspectives than can be supported by either extreme nativist or domain-general models of cognitive…