Development of strategies for recall and recognition.

Abstract

Kindergartners, third graders, and fifth graders viewed 30 pictures of familiar objects, and then their free recall of the object names and their recognition of the original pictures were tested. The recognition test included pairing each picture with another similar picture of the same object. Half the subjects in each age-group were prepared for recall with a strategy known to improve it in adults, and half were prepared for recognition with a strategy known to improve recognition in adults. Children encoded the stimuli differentially in accordance with the expected memory task and retrieved different stored information for each task. Both free recall and picture recognition memory improved with age. The recall strategy improved free recall performance at all ages, but the recognition strategy improved recognition performance only at the oldest age tested. Investigators of both children's and adults' memory have found different strategies beneficial for different memory tasks (e.g., Flavell, 1970; Paivio, 1971). Strategies are ways of encoding or representing material to facilitate later retrieval. For instance, Paivio and Csapo (1969) found that whereas verbal codes are particularly effective in sequential memory tasks, imaginal or pictorial codes are effective in free recall and paired-associate learning.