Developmental differences in the mental effort requirements for the use of an organizational strategy in free recall

Abstract

The mental effort requirements of free recall and the use of an organization strategy for recall were investigated in two experiments. Interference on a secondary task (finger tapping) was assessed to measure the mental effort requirements of the memory tasks. In a first experiment, it was found that comparable expenditure of mental effort resulted in better memory performance for adults and seventh-graders compared with third-graders, and for related lists compared with unrelated lists. In a second experiment, third- and seventh-graders were instructed to use an organizational strategy to remember a list of words. Although both third- and seventh-graders employed the organizational strategy and showed comparable expenditure of mental effort, this led to increased levels of performance only for the seventh-graders. The results suggest that when memory strategies are imposed on young children, what mental effort is expended on implementing the mnemonic reduces the amount of mental capacity available for other activities, resulting in only modest gains in memory performance.