The relation between attention to the incidental context and memory for words in children and adults

Abstract

The developmental relation between attention to target and contenxt information and target memory was examined in five experiments. Second and fifth graders and college adults were shown Hard (e.g., Hawk, Eagle, Canary) and Easy (River, Lake, Canary) word triplets, varying in the difficulty of identifying the “odd” word (Canary). The subjects had to identify the word themselves (oddity choice) or the word was picked out for them (read). In Experiment 1, the “odd” target word was distinguished from the triplet context words only by meaning, or by color or spatial configuration, and both “odd” word and incidental word cued recall were assessed. In the other experiments, color information was used as a task-irrelevant distractor (Experiment 2), target recall was assessed using the context words as cues (Experiment 3), the effects of a divided attention task on target recall was examined (Experiment 4), and recognition memory was assessed (Experiment 5). The results show that the allocation of attention for both children and adults varies in context-interactive and context-independent encoding situations. The results also show that when the context can be meaningfully related to target information adults generally may be less selective than children and are more likely to attend to context information, contributing to developmental retention differences. Adults may be more selective primarily in special situations that stress attentional capacity.