Encoding tasks and free recall in children

Abstract

In two experiments, children were compared on recall following orienting tasks that involved attention to semantic or nonsemantic features of words. In Experiment 1, young children benefited from a semantic task as much as older children, compared to a nonsemantic task, but younger children still recalled fewer words after either task. In Experiment 2, subjects had experience with various versions of tasks at the same level, then were transferred to a task that required no overt orienting decision. There was no evidence that experiences derived from overt classifications were spontaneously carried over to benefit general memory performance. This suggests that the benefits of semantic over nonsemantic orienting tasks are due to the automatic by-products that result for different types of orienting tasks, rather than to the priming of generalizable strategies.