Faculty Publications

Memorable Holidays and Planetary Lapses: Access, Stimulus Constraint, and Knowledge Base Problems in the Retrieval Search of Children and Adults

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Volume

46

Issue

2

First Page

247

Last Page

272

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the contribution of item-by-item retrieval search processes to developmental differences in cued recall. The four experiments were designed to examine or control problems involving search set access, the constraint on item order, the search object, and the knowledge base that usually may limit children's use of search strategies, as well as provide positive evidence about the use of such strategies in recall. In Experiment 1, second and fifth graders and college students were shown three-item stimuli (e.g., Tuesday Wednesday Friday) from ordered sets (e.g., the alphabet, planets, holidays) or unordered sets (states, oceans) of items, induced to classify the stimuli at acquisition by an orienting task, and asked to recall the final target item (Friday) and the other items in each stimulus in a cued recall task. The cues were the first item in each stimulus, the first two items, or the set name (days of the week). The results were compared to recall for four-item stimuli in Experiment 2, for no orient situations in Experiment 3, and for three-word category and theme stimuli in Experiment 4. The results showed that developmental cued recall differences remained even when the access, constraint, search object, and knowledge base problems were controlled or minimized. However, the results also suggested that item-by-item search processes per se contributed minimally to these recall differences, even in situations that seemed to encourage the use of such processes (i.e., ordered sets). © 1988.

Department

Department of Educational Psychology, Foundations, and Leadership Studies

Original Publication Date

1-1-1988

DOI of published version

10.1016/0022-0965(88)90059-8

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