Resource Requirements of Knowledge Access and Recall Benefits of Associative Strategies

Abstract

The present studies examined the relationships between knowledge-base access for elaborative events, children′s strategy use, and recall. Older children (grades four and five) and young adolescents (grades seven and eight) learned a mixed list of noun pairs that varied in knowledge-base access (accessible vs inaccessible). Subjects were instructed to generate sentences aloud (Experiment 1) or describe visual images aloud (Experiment 2) for each pair on study trials. Results showed that the pair descriptions could be reliably classified into the categories of Elaboration and Other Associative Strategies identified by Beuhring and Kee (1987). Overall, subjects made greater use of Other Associative Strategies than Elaboration. Sentence/image descriptions were more rapid for accessible than for inaccessible pairs and this difference was largest when subjects used Other Associative Strategies in contrast to Elaboration. For recall, on the other hand, the typical advantage of accessible pairs over inaccessible pairs was observed when subjects used Other Associative Strategies, but not Elaboration. Results also suggested an influence of the knowledge base on pair retrieval during cued recall (cue-offset to correct response onset): Subjects required less time to retrieve correct associates for accessible pairs than inaccessible pairs. The findings are discussed in terms of the effects of the resource demands of strategy use on the speed and effectiveness of strategy execution.