The use of item-specific and relational episodic information in the recall of children and adults

Abstract

Four experiments were conducted in order to show that the effects of itemspecific and relational encoding emphasis on recall vary with the retrieval context for both children and adults. In Experiment 1, second- and fifth-graders and college adults were oriented toward item-specific or subordinate and superordinate relational aspects of cue-target noun pair information, or encoding was unconstrained, pair presentation was blocked by target category or randomized, and both free and cued recall were examined. In Experiment 2, only the targets were presented at acquisition. In Experiment 3, the context cues at retrieval were blocked by category for relational orienting, and in Experiment 4 a categorical hint was provided for each randomized context cue. The results showed that relational information was particularly useful in free recall, while item-specific information was particularly useful in cued recall, though the effects varied somewhat with the acquisition organization of the stimuli. The results offer no support for claims that relational information is preeminent for young children.