Maria Rosa Baroni

Schematic information, attention, and memory for places.

Recall and recognition of various aspects of three places were studied under incidental and intentional conditions. Data showed that subjects passing through a place incidentally remembered structural features such as walls better than variable features such as furniture. On the other hand, subjects passing through a place knowing they will be tested for memory of its remembered the variable elements better than the structural elements. The results are interpreted in terms of intentionally governed coding.

Children's meta-pragmatic abilities and the identification of polite and impolite requests

The present study investigates two aspects of 5- and 7-year-old chil drens meta-pragmatic knowledge. The first is the ability to attribute polite and impolite requests according to degrees of perceived famil iarity among participants in a verbal exchange. The second is the representational explicitness of the pragmatic rule involved in the task. Thirty-two children of two age groups participated in the experi ment. Results showed a developmental difference both in the attribu tion task and in metapragmatic awareness, confirming an age-related increase in the ability to establish representational links among prag matic procedures.

Memory for Natural Settings: Role of Diffuse and Focused Attention:

Recall and recognition of various aspects of a real scene, a university corridor, were studied under three conditions. In the “low-attention” condition the subjects had to traverse the place in order to carry out aims attainable somewhere else; in the “medium-attention” condition instructions directed their attention to the place in a rather vague and unfocused manner; in the “high-attention” condition their attention was explicitly focused on all aspects of the corridor. An interaction of attention level with memory was investigated considering, according to schema theories, the distinction between expected, stable elements and unexpected, variable ones. It was predicted that memory of objects of furniture (variable elements) should be higher with medium than low, while memory of structural elements (stable elements) should be higher with medium than high attention. The results confirmed this hypothesis, suggesting that medium attention is well suited for investigating memory when the experimenters aim is to induce attention to all aspects of the environment.

Effects of familiarity in recalling interiors and external places

Abstract A study is reported in which memory is investigated for different aspects of places. The subjects who took part in the experiment were either familiar or unfamiliar with the places in question, and were asked to report all the features they could remember after having passed through them. Both interiors and external places were considered. The results of the quantitative analysis show effects of both familiarity and kind of environment on the types of elements recalled. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis based on various aspects of the reports has confirmed this trend and shown that the organization of the reports differs markedly between subjects, comparing familiar and unfamiliar places. The results of the research are discussed in the framework of schema theory in memory for places.

Some experimental findings about the question of politeness and women's speech (Research note)

A particular factor in linguistic variation which has often been connected to female speech is politeness, as first described by Lakoff (1973a, 1973b), manifested not only by means of intonation, but also through the use of particular formulae of courtesy, through the use of tag questions at the end of interrogatives, and the use of longer, less direct and peremptory sentences.

Representation of familiar places in children and adults: Verbal reports as a method of studying environmental knowledge

Abstract This research investigated childrens representations of familiar places by means of verbal reporting. Eight-year-old childrens representation of the entrance hall and the courtyard of their school was examined under three conditions: free recall; description from memory, intended for a person not acquainted with the place; and direct description, given while looking at the place. Childrens descriptions from memory were then compared with those given by a group of teachers in the school. Both contents and organization of verbal reportings were analyzed. Quantitative results showed a difference in recall between places only in children; furthermore, both children and adults mainly remembered the aspects of places which are constant constraints to actions. The importance of considering some qualitative-linguistic indexes was assessed by results showing, for instance, differences in childrens discourse organization across conditions, the relevance of cognitive more than physical boundaries of places, and age differences in localizing items.

Spatial Information Tested in Naturalistic Situations: Describing Routes

Descriptions of an urban route were requested from 54 subjects who represented three levels of familiarity with the route. Both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the verbal reports showed that previous familiarity is not always a good predictor of a better knowledge of the place and that the concept of familiarity for environments is more articulated than generally thought.