Memory Reorganization Research Articles

Children's perceptual organization of seriated displays: Evidence against a memory reorganization hypothesis

The memory for a seriated display and its reorganization over an eight-month interval was examined in educationally subnormal children. By including groups of children who viewed a random display and an array of disordered sticks, it was found that the reorganization into a more seriated drawing after the passage of time was not directly based on the original stimulus. Various controls including copying of the original material, and matching and recognition conditions, give evidence that the child's cognitive level affects encoding of the material as well as its later output. The observed phenomenon of 'memory' improvement may have little to do with stored images, and may instead be linked to the developmental symbolic level of the child which influences original perception as well as 'memory'. It was also found that educationally subnormal children perform like normal children of the same mental age on the seriation task.

The reorganization of verbal memory in childhood

Two experiments in short-term recognition for familiar words were performed to investigate the hypothesis that verbal memory in adults is lexically coded, and that the paradigmatic shift in children's free associations is a symptom of the acquisition by the 7-year old of this lexical memory system. Both results were positive. Syntagmatic linking, on the other hand, was found to influence recognition memory selectively only among children who had not yet undergone the shift. These results were held to be compatible with the explanation that the shift is accompanied by an increase in storage efficiency.