Composites, compromises, and CHARM: what is the evidence for blend memory representations?

Metcalfe's (1990) distributed memory model simulates many misinformation effects by assuming representations that superimpose information from multiple sources. In the present article, two types of evidence are reviewed for such "blend" representations: composite recollections, including items from both the original and postevent sources (e.g.

Cognitive-motivational influences on the task-related help-seeking behavior of black children.

The present study examined the relation between children's mastery motivation, self-assessment of performance, and task-related help-seeking behavior during task performance. Average-achieving black American children, varying in mastery motivation as measured by subscales of the Harter's Intrinsic-Extrinsic Orientation in the Classroom Scale, performed a multitrial verbal task and were given the opportunity to seek help on each trial after making a tentative response and assessing their performance by rating their confidence in the correctness of the response. A response-contingent payoff system was implemented to encourage children to restrict their help seeking to those instances in which they perceived that they could not make a correct response without assistance.

Children's self-assessment of performance and task-related help seeking.

The present research examined the role of self-assessment of performance on children's use of help-seeking as an achievement strategy. In two experiments, third- and fifth-grade children were blocked into low and high verbal skill groups. Children performed a multitrial verbal task in which they were required to indicate their confidence in the correctness of their tentative solution and then were given the opportunity to seek help before providing a final solution on each trial.

A partial solution to the homonym problem: parents' linguistic input to young children.

During early word learning, children may assume a unique form-meaning relationship: that a unique form corresponds to each meaning (Clark, 1987) and vice versa (Slobin, 1985). Homonyms appear to violate this one-to-one mapping, and therefore might prove problematic; for example, all things labeled bat might be put into the odd category 'things that fly and are used to play ball.' We asked whether parents' descriptions of homonyms to their young children provide linguistic information that could help children to differentiate conceptually and linguistically these cases.

Belief revision in children: the role of prior knowledge and strategies for generating evidence.

Evolving beliefs and reasoning strategies were observed in 22 fifth- and sixth-grade children who worked over 8 weeks for a total of about 5 h on a causal reasoning problem. Children planned, performed, and interpreted experiments to learn about the relations between design features and speed of race cars in a computerized microworld. The group made progress, but by the end of the sessions did not fully understand those features that disconfirmed their initial beliefs.

Verbal overshadowing of visual memories: some things are better left unsaid.

It is widely believed that verbal processing generally improves memory performance. However, in a series of six experiments, verbalizing the appearance of previously seen visual stimuli impaired subsequent recognition performance. In Experiment 1, subjects viewed a videotape including a salient individual.

Picture-word differences in decision latency: An analysis of single and dual memory models.

Semantic and perceptual size decision times for pictorial and verbal material were analyzed in the context of a unitary memory model and several dual memory models. Experiment 1 involved a same-different categorical judgment task. The results showed that picture-picture response latencies were 185 msec faster than the corresponding word-word latencies, and word-picture and picture-word latencies equaled the mean of these two extremes.

Acoustic and semantic interference effects in words and pictures.

Interference effects for pictures and words were investigated using a probe-recall task. Word stimuli showed acoustic interference effects for items at the end of the list and semantic interference effects for items at the beginning of the list, similar to results of Kintsch and Buschke (1969). Picture stimuli showed large semantic interference effects at all list positions with smaller acoustic interference effects.

Short-term memory limitations in children: Capacity or processing deficits?

This paper evaluates the assertion that short-term memory (STM) capacity increases with age. Initially an analysis is made of the STM system in terms of its parameters and control processes. No evidence was found that can suggest conclusively that either the capacity or the rate of information loss from STM varies with age.