Developmental and Individual Differences in Rapid Remembering

Abstract

WILKINSON, ALEX CHERRY; DEMARINIS, MARGARET; and RILEY, SUSAN J. Developmental and Individual Differences in Rapid Remembering. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 898-911. Children aged 10-14 years tried to identify and remember words presented visually with a backward mask. The mask onset asynchrony (MOA) was either 100 or 300 msec, while the asynchrony between successive words (ABW) was constant at 500 msec. On different tasks, the children recalled freely or serially, recognized by making a rapid forced-choice response, or simply named words as they were presented. The same children had participated in a similar study 1 year earlier. Comparisons were made across tasks, and correlations were examined across studies in an effort to identify cognitive processes that underlie individual and developmental differences in rapid remembering. The analyses included traditional tests of age differences and serial position curves, as well as new Markov models of repeated free recall. The results were parsimoniously interpretable as identifying 2 sources of developmental and individual variation: naming and associative storage.