Encoding activities and free recall of categorized and noncategorized pictures by young children

Abstract

Free recall of categorized and noncategorized lists of pictures by children in kindergarten and second grade was studied under incidental memory conditions involving a semantic orient­ ing task (i.e.• niceness judgments) or a physical orienting task (i.e., color judgments) in com­ parison with an intentional memory condition. The recall scores in the intentional and the incidental/semantic conditions were equivalent and were significantly greater than those in the incidental/physical condition for children at both ages and for both categorized and noncategor­ ized lists. This paper describes an exploratory study of the notion of an interaction between the extent ofknowledge ­ base development and the effects ofdifferent orienting tasks (e.g., see lindberg, 1980). Certainly, if there are no semantic structures, then an orienting task designed to tap this type of structure should be no more effective than a task orienting the child to more physical attri­ butes of the material. However, as increasing amounts of semantic structure are added to the knowledge-base, processing that taps this structure should become in­ creasingly effective . On the other hand , semantic struc­ ture that is not accessed by a particular orienting task should play no role in mediating incidental recall (see Brown, Bransford , Ferrara, & Campione , 1983, and Eysenck , 1982, for reviews). In short, good incidental memory performance (at any age) would seem to require both mnemonically useful knowledge and an orienting task that taps that knowledge. This reasoning leads to several expectations about the development of incidental memory performance that are as yet untested. For example, a semantic orienting task would be expected to lead to greater recall than a physical orienting task at an earlier age with a cate­ gorized list than with a noncategorized list. This follows from other evidence that the usefulness of the organiza­ tional structure in a categorized list emerges earlier than that in a noncategorized list (e.g., see Ornstein , Naus,