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Biomedical subjects

R E Guttentag

Publications and source records attributed to R E Guttentag.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1990

Relationships between study organization, retrieval organization, and general and strategy-specific memory knowledge in young children.

The present study examined relationships between young children's memory knowledge and their use of taxonomic and color memory organization. Forty-eight 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds were administered metamemory tests of organization-strategy knowledge and general memory knowledge, and were tested on two study-recall tasks before, and two study-recall tasks after, training in the use of color or taxonomic organization. Study organization (grouping) scores were low before training, but improved significantly in post-training tasks. Training effects were less pronounced for retrieval organization (clustering) and did not occur for item recall. Relationships between taxonomic study and retrieval organization were apparent only for the 7-year-olds, while relationships between color organization at study and retrieval were not apparent at any age level. Relationships between metamemory, strategy-use, and recall proficiency were evident on some tasks for 7-year-olds, but not for younger children. Although teacher ratings of the children's mastery orientations were also found to be related to recall proficiency for the older subjects, specific strategy knowledge was a more consistent correlate of strategy use and amount recalled.

Child↗
PubMed1988

Adult age differences in memory for imagined and performed actions.

Young and older adults were presented a list of 24 descriptions of simple actions. For each list item, subjects were either instructed to perform the action or else were instructed to imagine themselves performing the action. On a surprise recall test, age differences were found for both performed and imagined actions as well as for source judgments (remembering which actions had been performed and which imagined). The latter effect, however, resulted from the near chance level of performance of a minority of the older adults; the performance of the majority of the older adults overlapped with that of the young adults on the source judgment task.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

A developmental study of attention to auditory and visual signals.

Three experiments tested for developmental changes in attention to simple auditory and visual signals. Subject pressed a single button in response to the onset (Experiment 1) or offset (Experiment 2) of either a tone or a light. During one block of trials subjects knew which stimulus would come on or go off on each trial (precue condition) whereas during the other block of trials no precue was provided. In both experiments subjects as young as 4 years old responded more rapidly with precues, indicating that they were able to allocate their attention to the indicated modality. Experiment 3 utilized a choice reaction paradigm (in which subjects pressed different buttons in response to the onset of the light and the tone) in order to examine their attention allocation when no precues were provided. It was found that the adults and 7-year-olds tended to allocate their attention to vision rather than audition when no precue was provided. The results with the 4-year-olds were not entirely consistent, but suggested a similar biasing of attention to vision on their part as well.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

Automatic processing of word meaning: intralingual and interlingual interference.

Automatic processing of word meaning was studied in bilingual children and children in various stages of second-language acquisition in 2 experiments. A picture-word interference task was used. The children named outlined pictures as rapidly as possible while attempting to ignore distractor words printed inside the pictures' borders. For children proficient in the 2 languages (Experiment 1), the printed distractors interfered with naming on both intralingual trials, for which the distractor and naming language were the same, and on interlingual trials, for which they were different. The pattern of interference across 6 levels of name-distractor relation was similar for the intralingual and interlingual conditions and indicated that at least part of the interference occurred at a semantic level. For children who were in various phases of learning a second language (Experiment 2), second-language words were automatically processed to the level of meaning early in the course of second-language reading instruction. As was found for the more proficient groups, both the pattern and the amount of interlingual interference matched that for intralingual interference. The results question whether an "input switch" operates for bilingual word processing.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

Picture-naming interference with good and poor readers.

22 third grade children of high and low reading ability (ns = 11) were tested for their ability to name pictures while trying to ignore words or nonword strings of letters printed inside the pictures. Nonoverlapping sets of pictures and words were used as stimuli to avoid the possibility of sensitizing subjects to the particular words used in the experiment (Neisser, 1976). Both groups experienced more interference from intra-category than extra-category words, indicating that they processed the words automatically. Only the good readers experienced more interference from pseudowords than consonant strings, suggesting that poor readers are less sensitive than good readers to orthographic regularity.

Child↗
PubMed1979

A developmental study of automatic word processing in a picture classification task.

Second-grade children, third-grade children, and adults judged whether pictures were members of a positive or negative memory set while trying to ignore irrelevant words printed inside the pictures. There were 3 types of picture-word relation. In 1 condition, the words corresponded to the pictures. In a second condition, the pictures and words were incongruent, but the words corresponded to the correct response (e.g., with dog and horse the positive set pictures, a picture of a dog containing the word "horse"). In the third condition, the pictures and words were incongruent and corresponded to conflicting responses. For all 3 subject groups, the type of picture-word relation reliably affected response latencies, indicating that subjects automatically processed the irrelevant printed words.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Adult age differences in the attentional capacity demands of letter matching.

The attentional demands of letter matching were assessed using a secondary task technique with three adult subject groups. The mean ages were: Group 1 = 19.9 years, Group 2 = 58.7 years, Group 3 = 68.9 years. The primary task was letter matching on the basis of physical identity (PI) or name identity (NI); the secondary task was speeded response to a tone. Relative to baseline (single-task) tone RTs, subjects at all ages responded more slowly in the dual-task condition to tones on name-match trials than on physical-match trials. Also, the proportional difference in tone RT between baseline and dual-task trials was significantly larger for Group 3 than Group 1, but this analysis did not reveal a larger age difference for NI than PI matching. However, a second analysis revealed that absolute differences in tone RT between baseline and dual-task trials increased with age, and the magnitude of this effect was larger for NI than PI matching. The implications of the findings for theories of age differences in attentional capacity, and for issues in the measurement of attentional demands, are discussed.

Adolescent↗