Memory Development

Universal Changes and Individual Differences

Franz E. Weinert, Marion Perlmutter

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134738571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume, a collection of papers resulting from a conference sponsored by the Max Planck Society, presents an overview of past research on memory development, possible applications of this research, and new ideas for future areas of study. The role of cognitive components in the development of memory performance and the social and motivational contexts of memory development are described. Includes various theoretical approaches explaining memory development across the life span. Memory Development: Universal Changes and Individual Differences is of interest to researchers, undergraduates and graduate students in developmental psychology, educational psychology and technology, and experimental psychology.

I

The Development of Memory Strategies

1

The Early Development of Memory Strategies

Henry M. Wellman

University of Michigan

Mnemonic activities necessary for proficient recall are not yet under planful or effective control by age 4 (Perlmutter & Myers, 1979, p. 83).

The memory processing of young preschool children has been described as nonstrategic, nonplanful and nondeliberate and the results of this study have shown that these earlier descriptions seem largely accurate (Ratner, 1980, p. 64).

Preschoolers rarely use mnemonic strategies to aid remembering and instead rely on their natural activities of understanding of object-event relations to mediate recall (Paris & Lindauer, 1983, p. 335).

Memory strategies figure prominently in research into, and explanations for, memory development in older children and adults. However, the acquisition and development of such strategies are seldom invoked to account for memory developments in younger children, before the age of 6 or 7 years.

In the 1970s the generally accepted view of memory development was that increases in memory performance from about age six on were largely due to the older child’s increasing propensity to employ deliberate memory strategies to aid both storage and retrieval. Conversely, children younger than this were thought to be nonstrategic in memory endeavors. This characterization of the young child received direct and indirect support from four sources. Soviet theory and research described the memory activities of young children as involuntary, not voluntary (Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969). In North America young children were similarly described as generally production deficient (Flavell, 1970). Direct data on the presence of memory strategies were abundant for older children but were absent for preschoolers (e.g., Appell, Cooper, McCarrel, Sims-Knight, Yussen, & Flavell, 1972). And finally, that memory strategies first appeared at around school age fit well with cross-cultural research on schooling itself. In this research (e.g., Wagner, 1978) it seemed that the increased memory demands placed on Western children entering into formal educational arrangements provoked strategic attempts to remember.

Starting in the mid 1970s, however, demonstrations of the employment of certain memory-like strategies by quite young children began to appear (see Wellman, 1977a). Yet, such demonstrations have had little impact on our basic views of memory development. At best, descriptions of memory development now make passing note of some early, limited strategic attempts to remember. Why do strategy accounts of memory development loom large for school age children but not for preschoolers? I believe this is because the strategic-looking memory activities of young children are seen as suspect on four grounds. Specifically, young children’s putative memory strategies are (1) thought to be not really strategic, but instead manifestations of nondeliberate, involuntary response repertoires. Or, if strategic, they are (2) thought to be not mnemonic; they might be deliberate attempts to do something, but not specifically to remember. Or, if strategic and mnemonic, they are (3) thought to be limited and infrequent—limited to only quite helpful situations and thus occurring in the natural life of a child quite rarely. Finally, as a consequence of these limitations, memory strategies in young children are (4) thought to be insignificant in any explanatory sense: that is, the observed changes in memory performance over this age range are not seen as resulting from changes in strategy employment and effectiveness.

I argue that young children’s memory activites are strategic, are mnemonic, are frequent, and that changes in memory performance in the preschool years are dependent on strategy developments. Thus, accounts of strategy development are no less (and no more) important for understanding early memory developments, past infancy, than for understanding later memory developments, past kinder-garten.

Are Preschoolers Strategic in Memory Tasks?

An answer to this question requires some definition of the construct strategic. This is a concept that is widely and variously employed. I begin my discussion with a strict specification of what constitutes a strategy as well as what evidence is required to attribute such strategies to children (see Wellman, 1977a), and examine whether preschoolers’ memory activities are ever of that sort. Then I relax this definition and criteria, in hopes of capturing more fully the character and breadth of young children’s strategic enterprises.

Sometimes the term strategy is used to refer to any procedures, or rule, or regularity that an organism might evidence in processing information. In this usage the term strategy is simply identical with systematic information processing. In common parlance, however, the term strategy more narrowly denotes some routine or procedure deliberately employed to achieve some end. This makes the term strategy distinctive, and this perspective on strategies is the most common one in the developmental literature (Flavell, 1970; Wellman, 1977a; Naus & Ornstein, 1983). In my usage, therefore, strategies include only deliberate or intentional attempts to help oneself, e.g., to help oneself remember. As such, defining and diagnosing memory strategies is based on defining and diagnosing deliberate or intentional behavior. This in turn is based on a means-ends analysis of behavior. A memory strategy invokes one behavior or activity—a means—to influence remembering—the end. The means include anything one might do that aids memory—like rehearsal. The ends include various acts of remembering-storing items for future use, retrieving items now, both storage for or current attempts at recognition, reconstruction, or recall. Does demonstrating that young children engage in the relevant means-end activity provide sufficient evidence to conclude that they behave strategically? That is, is it sufficient to demonstrate that the child produced an appropriate means and it resulted in the end? No, because the means, while appropriate and effective, could have been produced accidentally or incidentally, i.e., produced not as a result of an intention to achieve the goal, but as a byproduct of some other goal or some habitual response to the situation. To be a strategy, the means must be employed deliberately, with some awareness, in order to produce or influence the goal.

How can we tell whether a strategic-seeming behavior is indeed strategic? An important diagnostic method here is the “differentiation” experiment.

In studies of memory development to date one part of the procedures has always been to instruct the subject to remember. With this type of approach, the assessment of [proper intention] requires that the subject be instructed in a memory goal and that he (or a control group) be given a number of alternative instructions in similar situations to control for habitual production, production due to misunderstanding of the instructions and other nonintentional productions. If the child engages in strategic-looking behaviors only (or especially) in the memory condition that seems good evidence that the behavior was not just incidental to the goal of remembering (Wellman, 1977a, pp. 91–92).

A full fledged differentiation experiment requires (a) contrasting conditions where subjects are instructed to remember versus are presented the same materials but given control instructions, (b) direct observation of potential strategic activities showing such activities to occur only or especially in the memory condition, and (c) evidence that the observed activities, when engaged in, appropriately aid remembering.

Are full differentiation results available for young children? Yes. For example, Wellman, Ritter, and Flavell (1975) had 3-year-olds witness a toy being hidden in one of many containers by an adult who then left the room. Upon leaving the room the adult told half of the children to “wait with the dog” and half to “remember where the dog is.” During the delay period 3-year-olds engaged in more looking at and touching of the actual hiding place (target container) when instructed to remember than when instructed to wait. Perhaps more importantly, children in the remember condition at times engaged in quite dramatic strategic displays, such as the girl who pointed repeatedly to the target container shaking her head yes, while pointing to incorrect containers and shaking her head no. Or the boy who moved the target container out of position, deliberately making it distinctive for later retrieval. Children given memory instructions remember more than subjects instructed to wait, and those engaging in higher levels of strategic activity had higher levels of recall.

As another case, consider a series of studies by DeLoache and Brown with 1

- and 2-year-olds. These studies are particularly interesting because of the very young age of the children. In the prototypic DeLoache and Brown study (1979, 1983), a toy is hidden in one of several natural locations in the child’s own home (e.g., a big bird doll is hidden under a chair cushion or behind a book shelf), the child is engaged in other activities for a delay of 1 to 4 minutes or so, and then has to find the toy. If children are carefully observed during the delay interval, they manifest several potentially strategic behaviors similar to those observed by Wellman et al. (1975) with somewhat older children. Some children say the name of the toy aloud (“Big bird”)—often together with its location (“Big bird chair”) or their future task (“find Big bird”); others look at or point to or otherwise maintain attention on the hiding place during the delay; at times they even peek at the object while it is hidden (DeLoache, Cassidy, & Brown, 1985).

Now, of course such behaviors might not be strategic. The toy, while hidden, is still salient and attractive. Specifically, these behaviors might represent only (a) partly inhibited desires to play with the toy or (b) anticipatory goal responses. The observed behaviors might only be coincidentally related to remembering, and thus might still be apparent even if children were not involved in a memory task. Fortunately, DeLoache et al. (1985) tested same-age children in two other conditions. In one, the toy was not hidden but placed in a visible position; yet the child’s task was still to retrieve it after a delay (“get big bird after he’s taken a nap”). In the other condition, the toy was hidden, but the experimenter rather than the child was given the task of getting the toy after a delay (“I’ll get big bird after he’s taken his nap”). If the previous behaviors were simply manifesting desires to play with the toy, they should occur in all three situations. If they represented anticipatory goal responses, they should occur at least in the two situations where the child’s goal was still to get the toy. However, only when the child’s task was to remember the (hidden) object did such behaviors appear with any frequency. The same behaviors were significantly rarer in the other two conditions.

Several other studies also provide complete differentiation evidence for young children. For example, Yussen (1974) showed that 4- and 5-year-olds will deliberately inspect and attend to the to-be-remembered stimuli if instructed to remember them. Children instructed to remember a model’s picture selections deliberately attended to the model (and avoided watching an attractive distraction) while children given alternate nonmemory instructions rarely did so. In some recent observations, I had 3-year-olds bury a toy in a sandbox in a small room. Then they and the adult left the room “to get some more toys” down the hall. Some of the children were told they would have to remember where the toy was when they came back; some were asked if they wanted to do anything before leaving but were not told to remember. When no mention was made of remembering, children simply departed; when remembering was mentioned, they often marked the hidden toy’s location by making a mark on the smooth sand, building a mound over the toy, or placing another toy directly over it. Fifty percent of the children in the remember condition marked the hidden object; only 20% in the non-remember condition did so. In addition, Heisel and Ritter (1981) gave 3- and 5-year-olds a memory for location task where the child had to hide an object in one of 196 containers arranged in a 14 x 14 container grid, and then later had to remember where the object was. In this task some locations but not others are good hiding places because they are distinctive and thus provide clear spatial cues to the object’s location—for example, the corners. Five-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) deliberately hid the objects in these corner locations—this was a deliberate memory strategy because it occurred only in a memory condition (when instructed to remember), not in a contrasting no-memory condition. In a second study, Heisel and Ritter showed that 4-year-olds also used this strategy under some conditions.

These studies demonstrate, I believe, clear strategic competence in young children. Granting the presence of early strategic activity for the moment, based on full-fledged differentiation studies, it is also informative to consider young children’s strategies if our criteria for the diagnosis of strategic activity are relaxed in certain ways. There are two issues here. One is simply methodological. Studies which do not employ the full differentiation method can still present convincing evidence as to the presence of strategic memory in young children. Specifically, the presence of some sort of deliberate memory activity can be inferred even if no specific activities are directly observed. For example, Acredolo, Pick, and Olson (1975) showed improved performance when 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were given intentional remember instructions versus when they were not. The researchers did not, however, attempt to observe or determine what sorts of strategies may have accounted for this effect. Similarly, incidental approaches to the task can be ruled out in ways other than using contrasting instructional groups. For example, we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: The Development of Memory Strategies
• Part II: Metamemory: Problems of Strategy Generalization and Strategy Training
• Part III: Knowledge Structure and Memory Development
• Part IV: Social and Motivational Contexts of Memory Development
• Part V: Theoretical Approaches of Universal Changes and Individual Differences in Memory Development Across the Life Span
• Author Index
• Subject Index