To Be Young, Gifted, and Strategic: Advantages for Memory Performance

Abstract

Gifted and nongifted children's use of an organizational strategy was contrasted on multitrial free-recall tasks, using different sets of items on each trial. In an initial experiment, gifted children initially had higher levels of recall and strategic functioning than nongifted children, but this advantage was lost on later trials. While overall there was an advantage to memory of being strategic, this advantage was statistically significant for the gifted children only at trial 1, whereas it was significant for the nongifted children on trials 2 through 5. A sort-recall procedure was used in Experiment 2, with results indicating that gifted children benefited more than nongifted children when strategy use was simplified, while the results of Experiment 3, which used nonsense words as stimuli, demonstrated that gifted children demonstrated greater use of active strategies than nongifted children. The results of these experiments were interpreted as evidence that at least a portion of gifted children's advantage on free recall tasks lies in nonstrategic processes.