PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

C J Brainerd

Publications and source records attributed to C J Brainerd.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

Autosuggestibility in memory development.

Autosuggestibility is a potentially common source of false memories in children. We studied a form of autosuggestibility in which children's answers to memory tests were shifted in the direction of their illogical solutions to reasoning problems. In Experiments 1 and 2, illogic-consistent shifts were identified in children's memories of the numerical inputs on class-inclusion problems. The magnitudes of the shifts declined with age, and they appeared to be due to the intrusion of inappropriate gist on memory probes rather than retroactive interference from illogical reasoning. A model of how gist intrusion causes autosuggestibility was investigated in Experiments 3-5. The model assumes that children retrieve and process inappropriate gist when memory tests supply cues that are inadequate to permit access to verbatim memories.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1994

Nonstrategic facilitation of children's recall: evidence of triage with semantically related information.

When children and adults recall unrelated materials, they tend to produce words in a weaker memory strength-->stronger memory strength-->weaker memory strength order (the cognitive triage effect). This pattern is associated with recall accuracy. The present research investigates whether similar patterns occur when children recall lists of semantically related words that support the use of mnemonic organizational strategies. The optimization model predicts triage patterns regardless of list composition; the classic strategy model predicts categorical organization of recall for categorically composed lists. In Experiment 1, fourth and seventh graders recalled lists of typical and atypical exemplars from several different categories. In Experiment 2, second and sixth graders recalled lists of categorized or unrelated words. In both experiments, children's recall followed triage patterns based on on-line assessments of memory strength (error/success histories). Analyses of recall order, memory strength grouping, and the correlation between strength grouping and recall accuracy in both experiments supported the conclusion that children order their recall according to on-line memory strength, regardless of list composition.

Child↗
PubMed1993

Memory independence and memory interference in cognitive development.

Recent experiments have established the surprising fact that age improvements in reasoning are often dissociated from improvements in memory for determinative informational inputs. Fuzzy-trace theory explains this memory-independence effect on the grounds that reasoning operations do not directly access verbatim traces of critical background information but, rather, process gist that was retrieved and edited in parallel with the encoding of such information. This explanation also envisions 2 ways in which children's memory and reasoning might be mutually interfering: (a) memory-to-reasoning interference, a tendency to process verbatim traces of background inputs on both memory probes and reasoning problems that simultaneously improves memory performance and impairs reasoning, and (b) reasoning-to-memory interference, a tendency for reasoning activities that produce problem solutions to erase or reduce the distinctiveness of verbatim traces of background inputs. Both forms of interference were detected in studies of children's story inferences.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

Children's cognitive triage: optimal retrieval or effortful processing?

Cognitive triage is a surprising nonmonotonic relationship that exists between the order in which children read words out of long-term memory and the memory strengths of those same words. Two forgetting experiments with 7- and 12-year-old children are reported in which fuzzy-trace theory's explanation of this effect was pitted against an effortful processing explanation. The two explanations make different predictions about the relative rates of forgetting for words that are recalled at the primacy and recency positions of output queues. The data consistently favored fuzzy-trace theory's predictions. We discuss the implications of our results for two assumptions that are commonly made in theories of memory development--namely, that recall accuracy is a monotonic-increasing function of memory strength and that recall order is a monotonic-decreasing function of memory strength.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

The development of forgetting and reminiscence.

Many theoretical positions on memory development anticipate that forgetting rates should vary substantially with age. The nature of these age variations is also relevant to many applied questions about child development that have major social policy implications, such as the veracity of children's eyewitness testimony and the long-term effectiveness of classroom instruction. Surprisingly, developmental studies of long-term retention have repeatedly produced the puzzling finding that forgetting rates are age invariant. It now seems, however, that these null age trends may have been artifacts of variables such as measurement insensitivity, floor effects, and stages-of-learning confounds. Assuming, as some later studies suggest, that forgetting rates vary with age when these factors are controlled, there are three overriding questions that must be dealt with in the developmental analysis of forgetting: the relative importance of storage failure versus retrieval failure, the relative importance of true forgetting processes versus test-induced processes, and the relative importance of storage-based reminiscence versus retrieval-based reminiscence. We describe a framework (disintegration/redintegation theory) that provides a conceptual environment within which research on these questions can progress. This framework, which evolved from fuzzy-trace theory, reinterprets processes such as storage failure, retrieval failure, restorage, and retrieval relearning in terms of levels of featural integration in traces (i.e., the extent to which contextual information is integrated with core semantic gist to produce a coherent representation). The theory is implemented in a mathematical model (the trace-integrity model) whose parameters deliver measurements of relevant memory processes on a common ratio scale. In a series of experiments, the model was used to study the theory's predictions about the contributions of these memory processes to long-term retention in subjects between the ages of 7 and 70. All the experiments were standard long-term retention designs (an initial acquisition session, followed by a 1-2-week forgetting interval, followed by a series of retention tests).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Adult↗
PubMed1985

Storage-retrieval processes of normal and learning-disabled children: a stages-of-learning analysis of picture-word effects.

Previous research comparing acquisition performance of learning-disabled and normally achieving children has led to the suggestion that the locus of memory differences lies in either the storage or retrieval components of recall. In this paper we report a free-recall experiment in which a new stages-of-learning model was used to examine the effects of a picture-word manipulation on storage and retrieval differences between nondisabled and disabled grade 2 and 6 children. Although the results of this experiment were consistent with the idea that disabled students are poorer at memory tasks than nondisabled students, the stages-of-learning analysis provided information regarding the precise locus of the deficiencies. Specifically, although disabled and nondisabled children benefited from the presentation of information in pictorial format, normally achieving children were consistently better than their learning-disabled counterparts at storing and learning to retrieve both pictures and words. From a developmental standpoint, the most important finding was that while differences between learning-disabled and normally achieving students at storage remained age invariant, differences in learning to retrieve increased with age. As it turned out, however, differences between disabled and nondisabled children were absent when it came to retaining traces once they had been stored in memory and in retrieval performance between the time a trace was stored and retrieval learning was complete. These results are consistent with previous research in which it has been shown that the ability to learn how to reliably retrieve information that has been stored in memory develops more slowly for disabled than nondisabled children.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1975

A developmental study of Piaget's groupement model of the emergence of speed and time concepts.

3 key predictions of Piaget's groupement model of middle-childhood cognition were examined in the speed and time concept areas: (a) The respective composition and reverse operations of 2 of the 8 structures posited in the groupement model (Groupement I and Groupement V) should emerge synchronously in each of the 2 concept areas. (b) The 2 structures themselves should emerge synchronously in each of the 2 concept areas. (c) Between the 2 concept areas, the 2 structures should both emerge in the speed area before either emerges in the time area. The findings failed to support either prediction a or prediction b, and they were only partially consistent with prediction c. However, the findings concerning predictions a and b were consistent with other recent developmental evidence on the emergence of groupement structures in concept areas other than speed and time.

Age Factors↗