An Examination of Visual and Verbal Coding Processes in Preschool Children

Abstract

BROWN, R. MICHAEL. An Examination of Visual and Verbal Coding Processes in Preschool Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 38-45. Two experiments examined preschoolers' visual and verbal coding processes in a pictorial short-term memory task. Mode of coding (visual or verbal) was inferred from differences in recall under conditions of low and high visual or auditory similarity of the stimuli to be remembered. In Experiment I the stimuli were drawings of a cat that varied in degree of visual similarity. In Experiment II the stimuli were cards displaying letters of the alphabet that varied in degree of visual as well as auditory similarity. Results of both experiments indicated that high visual similarity had a deleterious effect on recall accuracy regardless of the verbal codability of the stimuli. In addition, recall scores improved over time in Experiment I, and primacy and recency effects related to serial position were observed in Experiment II. These findings implicate visual coding as a potentially important means of representation in short-term storage for preschool children.