Life-Span Developmental Changes in Mnemonic Organization: A Multimethod Analysis

Abstract

A set of pictures of common objects classifiable either perceptually on the basis of five color categories or semantically on the basis of five categories of meaning was randomly arranged and presented to groups of 4-year old, 6-year old, 10-year old, adult and elderly adult subjects. Free recall was assessed for the tendency to cluster semantically related items and items of the same color. In a recognition memory task, the tendency for subjects to erroneously select semantically or chromatically similar distractors was measured. Subjects also classified the pictures in a free sorting task, and the amount of semantic and color sorting was measured. A maximum-likelihood multimethod factor analysis of the correlations among the measures of recall clustering, free sorting and recognition errors revealed significant convergent validity for consistent use of a semantic and perceptual organization strategy in the three tasks. Subsequent analysis of errorfree "latent" organization scores revealed that 10-year old, adult, and elderly adult subjects relied on a semantic strategy. Four and six-year olds encoded both semantic and perceptual information about the stimulus items, with the younger preschoolers relying primarily upon the latter when using an organizational strategy. Age differences in memory capacity did not substantially affect this developmental trend in strategy use. Implications of these findings for parallel developments in memory and cognition were discussed.