Children's difficulties in deliberate memory for spatial relationships: Misapplication of verbal mnemonic strategies?

Abstract

To examine the importance of children's learning to fit mnemonic strategies to specific tasks, this study investigated the role of deliberate remembering in 5-, 7-, and 10-year-old children's memory for spatial relationships. The children explored a laboratory funhouse under three conditions: being told to remember, not being told to remember but being involved with the information through a spatial activity, and being told to remember as well as being involved with the information through a spatial activity. Previous research suggests that, by roughly age 7, children attempt to remember lists through linear strategies such as rehearsal. In learning to master such linear strategies, children may attempt to apply them to tasks in which they are less relevant, such as remembering spatial relations in complex nonlinear spaces. Hence, it was expected that 7-year-olds would perform more poorly on a spatial-memory test when told to remember than when simply involved with the spatial information in an incidental activity. These differences were not expected for 5-year-olds, who are not expected to apply linear strategies such as rehearsal, or for 10-year-olds, who may be more skilled in tailoring their memory strategies to the spatial memory task. The findings supported the predictions. Seven-year-old children who were told to remember (with or without the incidental spatial activity) performed more poorly than 7-year-olds who were not told to remember but were only involved with the information in the spatial activity. The 7-year-olds who were told to remember appeared to apply an inappropriate list-memory strategy, consistent with rehearsal. There were no differences between conditions for the 5- or 10-year-old children, and performance improved with age. The difference between conditions for the 7-year-olds suggests that children who are learning to use linear strategies may overapply them, with resulting decrements in recall of nonlinear spatial information.