Results from three experiments suggest that attention to context may benefit target recall in situations in which the context can be meaningfully related to the target. Adults seem to be more able to engage in context-interactive processing of stimulus information than are children, who base target selection on perceptual information. (PCB)

The goal of this study was to determine some of the factors that contribute to developmental differences children and adults display when they use cues to retrieve specific memories. (PCB)

Determines some of the reasons for developmental differences in retrieval variability. The critical manipulation involved the use of semantic orienting questions at both acquisition and retrieval; elementary school children (7 and 10 years of age) and adults participated. (Author/CI)

Kindergarten children (N=60 boys and girls) were presented with a paired-associate memory task in which the pairs were elaborated by either a normal interaction (e.g., The horse eats the apple.) or a bizarre interaction (e.g., The horse peels the apple.) in order to test the assumption that bizarreness is a necessary factor in a mnemonic system.…

Children were presented with a related-word triplet (horse, pig, cow) with or without accompanying setting, or place, information (farm). Children were later given a retrieval cue from the first two words of the triplet and asked to recall the third word. Found that place information presented at acquisition and retrieval facilitated children's…

Six experiments examined the problems third graders, sixth graders, and college students had in gaining access to episodic information while retrieving information from memory. Results suggested that conceptual access problems vary with grade and that elaboration of the representation of an episode facilitates access. (Author/SKC)

Five experiments investigated whether the cued recall of children and adults differed for classified events featuring different category and relation types. Recall for events differed strongly for children and adults. Differences were attributed to properties of the internal structure of event representation in memory. (SKC)

Used four experiments to examine retrieval access and item-by-item search processes and strategies in the cued recall of children in grades 3 and 6, and of adults. Results suggested that retrieval access is a problem for young children and contributes strongly to developmental increases in recall. Adults used retrieval strategies, although search…

Four experiments examined the contribution of item-by-item retrieval search processes to developmental differences in cued recall. Results indicated that developmental cued recall differences remained even when access, constraint, search object, and knowledge base problems were controlled or minimized. (SKC)

Examined children's modification of their own retrieval processes in a cued recall task. Results suggested that monitoring and modification of retrieval processes should be distinguished and that monitoring is necessary but not sufficient for induction of an effective retrieval strategy. Results also had implications for understanding children's…

This experiment assessed interactions between encoding and retrieval strategies in recall. Three levels of encoding conditions (random, blocked,sort) and three types of retrieval conditions (free, cued, constrained) were examined at three age levels (6, 10, and 18 years). (CM)

Analyzes results of four experiments using noun category and thematic stimuli and suggests that the associative structures of memory help constrain and mediate retrieval search for stimulus information. Also, that these structures as well as representations of the stimulus events in memory seem to differ for thematic and category events, and for…

Developmental differences in the relative salience of features in concept representations in semantic memory and their contributions to differences in cued recall were examined in two experiments. Subjects were second graders, fifth graders, and college students. Results showed that recall varied with feature salience, with salience greatest for…

Describes four experiments to show that the effects of item-specific and relational encoding emphasis on recall vary with the retrieval context for both young children and adults. (HOD)

Provides direct evidence of developmental differences in the processing of item-specific information, discussing how these differences affect recognition as well as recall performance in second graders, fifth graders, and college adults. Results suggest that retention varies as a result of the degree to which children differ from adults in…