This study explored under what conditions young children would set reminders to aid their memory for delayed intentions. A computerized task requiring participants to carry out delayed intentions under varying levels of cognitive load was presented to 63 children (aged between 6.9 and 13.0 years old). Children of all ages demonstrated…

Four tasks (N = 191, 3- to 6-year-olds) examined the effect of instrumental versus conventional language cues on children's imitative fidelity of a necklace-making activity, their memory and transmission of the activity, and their perceptions of functional fixedness. Children in the conventional condition imitated with higher fidelity, transmitted…

The concept of spreading activation describes how retrieval of one memory cues retrieval of other memories that are associated with it. This study explored spreading activation in 6-, 12-, and 18-month-old infants. Infants (n = 144) learned two tasks within the same experimental session; one task, deferred imitation (DI), is typically remembered…

Prior research has found that toddlers will form enduring artifact categories after direct exposure to an adult using a novel tool. Four studies explored whether 2- (N = 48) and 3-year-olds (N = 32) demonstrate this same capacity when learning by eavesdropping. After surreptitiously observing an adult use 1 of 2 artifacts to operate a bell via a…

The link between emotion regulation and academic achievement is well documented. Less is known about specific emotion regulation strategies that promote learning. Six- to 13-year-olds ("N" = 126) viewed a sad film and were instructed to reappraise the importance, reappraise the outcome, or ruminate about the sad events; another group…

Although infantile amnesia has been investigated for many years in adults, only recently has it been investigated in children. This study was a 2-year follow-up and extension of an earlier study. Children (4-13 years old) were asked initially and 2 years later for their earliest 3 memories. At follow-up, their age at the time of these memories…

The present research examined the influence of prior knowledge on children's free recall, cued recall, recognition memory, and source memory judgments for a series of similar real-life events. Forty children (5-12 years old) attended 4 thematic birthday parties and were later interviewed about the events that transpired during the parties using…

Describes three delayed-response experiments which tested two- and three-year-old children's memories for location of a hidden object under several combinations of spatial and pictorial cue availability and emphasis. (Author/JMB)

Two-year-old children's memory for locations of hidden objects was examined in four cue conditions. Pictures marked hidden-object locations in three of these conditions, and either depicted or were related associatively to hidden objects. In the fourth condition, only blank cards were presented with the objects. (Author/SS)

Reports an experiment with five-year-old children which tested the hypothesis that a change in affect between input and test interferes with performance in a nominally noncued free recall test but not with performance on a cued recall test. (JMB)

First, third, and fifth graders hid a series of "people pictures" in containers, half of which bore picture cues related to the people's societal roles and half of which bore cues unrelated to the people's roles. Aspects of their memory-for-location were then analyzed by grade level. (Author/JMB)

In an investigation of young children's use of context cues in reproducing drawings and geometric shapes, 36 preschool children drew a series of horizontal, vertical, and oblique lines from immediate memory on square backgrounds. (BRT)

The visual short-term cued recall memory of 8-, 12-, and 16-month-olds was assessed in two experiments using an operant indirect delayed-reaction procedure. In each experiment, 12- and 16-month olds performed better than chance, whereas 8-month-old infants did not. (Author/DB)

In this study of the distinction between temporal distance and location, children were asked to judge the relative recency and time of target events that occurred one and seven weeks before testing. All judged recency and localized time of day correctly. Six- and eight- but not four-year olds localized longer time scales. (BC)

Results of two experiments suggested (1) that spatial cues serve as functional stimuli in the standard probe-type task, and (2) that the contextual uniqueness of the first item is probably responsible for the occurrence of primacy in young children. (Author/JMB)