The role of perceptual salience and type of instruction in children’s recall of relevant and incidental dimensional values

Abstract

Kindergarten and sixth-grade children were asked to recall the array locations of dimensional values in tasks in which instructions about the relevant dimension and the salience of the task dimensions were varied. For half of the subjects within each age group, the more salient dimension was relevant and the less salient dimension was incidental to problem solution. For the remaining subjects, the procedure was reversed. Before presenting the task within each salience condition, half of the subjects were shown the values of the relevant dimension and told to remember them. The results offered no support for the position that older subjects are cognitively better able than younger subjects to select relevant and to ignore incidental information. For younger and older subjects, both relevant and incidental recall were superior for values of the more salient dimension. Prior instructions about which dimension was relevant had no effect on recall.