Cognitive Scanning Processes in Children

Abstract

Third- and fifth-grade children and adults were presented with 8-item letter sequences of varied approximations to English in a tachistoscopic single report, cue delay task. Age differences in report accuracy suggested that younger children, as compared with adults, may be at a double disadvantage in tasks requiring perceptual-memory processing: Their initial intake capacity and/or selective processing abilities may be more limited than those of adults; and the subsequent strategy employed by children to transfer iconic information into a more permanent memory store appears to be qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, different (less systematic, less orderly, and less efficient) than that used by adults. The suggestion that children's reading experience and ability (as assessed by a word recognition task) may be related to their systematic use of an orderly left-to-right iconic transfer strategy was also examined. In addition, the results suggested that the differential letter-pattern familiarity effect between children and adults may not be attributable to visual intake components but, rather, may be related to the relative rates with which familiar letter patterns are transferred out of iconic memory.