The Effect of Recognition Experience on Cued Recall in Children and Adults

Abstract

ACKERMAN, BRIAN P., and RATHBURN, JILL. The Effect of Recognition Experience on Cued Recall in Children and Adults. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1855-1864. In 2 experiments, this study assessed the effect of recognition experience intervening between acquisition and retrieval on cued recall for episodic information. Second and fourth graders and college adults were shown cue-target word pairs at acquisition and the cues alone at retrieval. Acquisition encoding was constrained by specific or categorical orienting questions or was not constrained at all. The recognition experience consisted of rows of words, each containing a critical target word (Experiment 1) or cue word (Experiment 2) to be identified, and context words belonging to either the same category as both the cue and target words, a category related only to the critical word, or unrelated words. Also, some critical words received no recognition experience. The results in general showed same experience facilitated memory for the pair information, and different experience reduced memory. The effects of recognition experience were stronger in children than in adults, suggesting that the greater mutability of children's stored episodic representations contributes to their problems of retrieving episodic information.