Distinguishing between Two Covert Learning Strategies in Elementary School Children

Abstract

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in distinguishing among different cognitive processes (see, for example, Paivio, 1975). At the operational level, an experimenter frequently instructs subjects to engage in different types of rehearsal activity (e.g., one that emphasizes verbal processing versus one that emphasizes pictorial processing). When such rehearsal is manifested overtly (e.g., verbal through speech and pictorial through drawing or picture construction), it is a straightforward matter to decide whether a subject did in fact execute the given instruction. On the other hand, when the rehearsal is done covertly (e.g., internal verbal rehearsal or imagery generation) one's confidence in the extent to which subjects followed instructions-if not shaped by subjects' self reportsis often based on actual performance outcomes. That is, if it is believed that one particular covert rehearsal strategy should be more effective than another one, reliable mean performance differences associated with the two different instruc-