The development of the picture‐superiority effect

Abstract

When pictures and words are presented serially in an explicit memory task, recall of the pictures is superior. While this effect is well established in the adult population, little is known of the development of this picture‐superiority effect in typical development. This task was administered to 80 participants from middle childhood to adolescence. The magnitude of the picture superiority effect increased with age. This finding is interpreted as supporting the position that pictorial superiority is contingent upon the encoding of pictorial information through two different routes.