Ocular Strategies of Young Children and Adults in Two Memorization Tasks

Abstract

Oculomotor activity during a 10-second inspection of stimuli to be subsequently recalled was recorded in 5and 7-year old subjects and in adults (20 subjects in each group). Subjects either memorized the content of three different designs, or the location of three identical flowers. The spatial characteristics of the two stimuli were the same. It was hypothesized that the Ss would organize their ocular activity in relation to the task. Of particular concern was the meaning young children would attribute to "the same place", as it could be inferred from points explored and from the sequence of fixations in the visual field. The data revealed that the 5-year olds used the same exploratory strategy in both tasks, perhaps because they lack a clear representational concept of what a location is. Seven-year olds used differentiated strategies, scanning as adults do in the content task, and relating elements to each other in the position task.