Visual short-term memory (VSTM) research suggests that the adult capacity is limited to three or four multifeature object representations. Despite evidence supporting a developmental increase in capacity, it remains unclear what the unit of capacity is in children. The current study employed the change detection paradigm to investigate both the…

Little is known about how components of executive function (EF) jointly and uniquely predict different aspects of academic achievement and how this may vary across cultural contexts. In the current study, 119 Chinese and 139 American preschoolers were tested on a battery of EF tasks (i.e., inhibition, working memory, and attentional control) as…

Recent work on adult metacognition indicates that although metacognitive monitoring often guides control operations, sometimes it follows control operations and is based on the feedback from them. Consistent with this view, in self-paced learning, judgments of learning (JOLs) made at the end of each study trial "decreased" with the amount of time…

When given the opportunity to take notes in memory tasks, children sometimes make notes that are not useful. The current study examined the role that task constraints might play in the production of nonmnemonic notes. In Experiment 1, children played one easy and one difficult memory game twice, once with the opportunity to make notes and once…

We report two empirical studies that investigated previously reported benefits of a high accuracy motivation, and thus a high threshold, for children's and adults' event recall and for their ability to resist false suggestions. In the studies, 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds, as well as adults, were shown a brief video about an event and were later asked…

Two studies were conducted to test incentive magnitude effects on free recall. Fifth and eighth graders and college adults were tested in conditions in which they were instructed to either rehearse overtly or engage in a counting task prior to the experiment. Results support theories emphasizing rehearsal as a mediator of incentive level effects…

Examines fourth grade children's memory for information contained in target sentences presented 24 hours earlier. Examines the occurrence of interference by presenting multiple choice response options consisting of a correct word, a new word, and a word which occurred in a previous sentence. Attempts to extend the principles of frequency theory.…

Seventy kindergarten children learned to order 12 objects that were well known and either unrelated or categorizable into well-known categories. Free recall was assessed. Results indicated the children used category membership both to learn and to recall the items. (Author/SB)

Examines the effectiveness of training children from grades 3 through 7 to organize information to be recalled into predetermined class inclusion hierarchies. Examines the effect of this training on performance on a transfer task requiring subjective organization. (BD)

Three experiments demonstrate that children four to ten years old, when presented with a series recall task with pictures of common objects having short or long names, showed consistently better recall of pictures with short names. (HOD)

Examines the relationship between the mental effort requirement of cumulative rehearsal and spontaneous utilization of the strategy by three groups of children (mean ages 7.6, 8.7, and 11.5 years). Results showed that the mental effort requirement of strategy use may influence children's strategy selection on memory tasks. (Author/CI)

The locus of facilitation due to rehearsal was investigated in three experiments with first-grade children. Several difference overt acquisition strategies in a four-item sequential memory task were compared, including ordered repetition, item repetition, item labeling, and free strategy conditions. (Author/SB)

A complex task designed to elicit a variety of memorization strategies was presented to 236 children aged 10 to 14. (MP)

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the influence of review on children's delayed retention of prose passages. Results indicated repetition of the original learning experience was the most effective review treatment. (Author/DB)

Investigated the role of language proficiency and automatization of language skills in the use of spontaneous rehearsal strategies by 7- to 13-year olds who are deaf. Regression analyses demonstrated that age was a nonsignificant predictor of rehearsal use and that language proficiency and the automatization of language skills were highly…