Making a memorable event: Effects of familiarity and organization on young children's recall of action sequences

Abstract

Recent research has focused on whether or not young children encode order information in their earliest representations of events. Elicited imitation was used to examine 17.5- to 23.0-month-old subjects' immediate and delayed recall (6-week delay) of event sequences characterized by different levels of familiarity and different types of relations among items. Ordered recall at both immediate and delayed testing was superior for familiar sequences and for novel sequences characterized by causal or enabling relations among items; ordered recall of novel sequences characterized by arbitrary relations among items was significantly lower. The data are consistent with the argument that children encode order information in their earliest representations of events and that the use of temporal information in recall is a function of the type of relations among items in a sequence.