Springer Series in Cognitive Development

Series Editor Charles J. Brainerd

Springer Series in Cognitive Development

Series Editor: Charles J. Brainerd

Children's Logical and Mathematical Cognition: Progress in Cognitive Development

Research

Clwrles J. Brainerd (Ed.)

Verbal Processes in Children: Progress in Cognitive Development Research Clwrles J. Brainerd/Miclwel Pressley (Eds.)

Adult Cognition: An Experimental Psychology of Human Aging Timothy A. Salthouse

Recent Advances in Cognitive-Developmental Theory: Progress in Cognitive

Development Research

Clwrles J. Brainerd (Ed.)

Learning in Children: Progress in Cognitive Development Research Jeffrey Bisanz/Gay L. Bisanz/Robert Kail (Eds.)

Cognitive Strategy Research: Psychological Foundations

Miclwel Pressley/Joel R. Levin (Eds.)

Cognitive Strategy Research: Educational Applications Miclwel Pressley/Joel R. Levin (Eds.)

Equilibrium in the Balance: A Study of Psychological Explanation Sophie Haroutunian

Crib Speech and Language Play Stan A. Kuczaj. II

Discourse Development: Progress in Cognitive Development Research

Stan A. Kuczaj. II (Ed.)

Cognitive Development in Atypical Children: Progress in Cognitive Development

Research Linda S. Siegel/Frederick J. Morrison (Eds.)

Basic Processes in Memory Development: Progress in Cognitive Development Research

Clwrles J. Brainerd/Michael Pressley (Eds.)

Cognitive Learning and Memory in Children: Progress in Cognitive Development Research

Michael Pressley/Charles J. Brainerd (Eds.)

Basic Processes in Memory Development

Progress in Cognitive Development Research

Edited by

Charles J. Brainerd and Michael Pressley

Springer-Verlag New York Berlin Heidelberg Tokyo

Charles J. Brainerd Department of Psychology University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2E9

Michael Pressley Department of Psychology University of Western Ontario London, Ontario Canada N6A 5C2

Series Editor: Charles J. Brainerd

With 12 Figures

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Basic processes in memory development.

(Springer series in cognitive development) Companion vol. to: Cognitive learning and mem­

ory in children. 1. Memory in children-Addresses, essays, lec­

tures. 2. Memory-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Brainerd, Charles J. II. Pressley, Michael. III. Series. BF723.M4B36 1985 155.4'13 84-24691

© 1985 by Springer-Verlag New York Inc. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1985

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form without written permission from Springer-Verlag, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,

New York 10010, U.S.A. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, etc., in this publication,

even if the former are not especially identified, is not to be taken as a sign that such names, as understood by the Trade Marks and Merchandise Marks Act, may accordingly

be used freely by anyone.

Typeset by Ampersand Publisher Services, Inc., Rutland, Vermont.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4613-9543-0 DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4613-9541-6

e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4613-9541-6

Series Preface

For some time now, the study of cognitive development has been far and away the most active discipline within developmental psychology. Although there would be much disagreement as to the exact proportion of papers published in developmental journals that could be considered cognitive, 50% seems like a conservative estimate. Hence, a series of scholarly books devoted to work in cognitive development is especially appropriate at this time.

The Springer Series in Cognitive Development contains two basic types of books, namely, edited collections of original chapters by several authors, and original volumes written by one author or a small group of authors. The flagship for the Springer Series is a serial publication of the "advances" type, carrying the subtitle Progress in Cognitive Development Research. Each volume in the Progress sequence is strongly thematic, in that it is limited to some well-defined domain of cognitive­developmental research (e.g., logical and mathematical development, development of learning). All Progress volumes will be edited collections. Editors of such collections, upon consultation with the Series Editor, may elect to have their books published either as contributions to the Progress sequence or as separate volumes. All books written by one author or a small group of authors are being published as separate volumes within the series.

A fairly broad definition of cognitive development is being used in the selection of books for this series. The classic topics of concept development, children's thinking and reasoning, the development of learning, language development, and memory development will, of course, be included. So, however, will newer areas such as social-cognitive development, educational applications, fonnal modeling, and philosophical implications of cognitive-developmental theory. Although it is

vi Series Preface

anticipated that most books in the series will be empirical in orientation, theoretical and philosophical works are also welcome. With books of the latter sort, hetero­geneity of theoretical perspective is encouraged, and no attempt will be made to foster some specific theoretical perspective at the expense of others (e.g., Piagetian versus behavioral or behavioral versus information processing).

c.J. Brainerd

Preface

This is the seventh volume in the Progress in Cognitive Development sequence. It is part of a two-volume treatment of research on memory development. Its companion volume is Cognitive Learning and Memory in Children.

The study of memory or, as it used to be called, verbal learning has been one of the cornerstones of experimental psychology since Ebbinhaus' time. The sys­tematic study of memory development, however, is a contemporary phenomenon, with most studies having appeared within the present decade. It is true, of course, that certain child-memory measures, such as digit span, have always been incor­porated in Binet-type intelligence tests. But as recently as 1964, Keppel drew attention to the scarcity of memory-development research in a review article that was published in Psychological Bulletin. In fact, Keppel's first sentence contained the statement that "subjects in experiments on verbal learning have been prepon­derantly the college sophomore, with only an occasional experiment reported in which younger or older subjects were employed." Keppel went on to observe that during the period covered by his review (1940-1964), virtually no developmental research had been reported with such redoubtable memory paradigms as serial learning, free recall, and long-term retention. Subsequent reviews of the early literature appeared in a 1968 article in the Bulletin by Goulet and in Reese and Lipsitt's classic textbook Experimental Child Psychology (1970). Although these reviewers painted a more rosy picture of memory-development research, they agreed that the extant data on most standard paradigms were very thin.

It seems, at least in retrospect, that the major reason for the lack of interest in memory development was the widespread opinion that such studies were of marginal theoretical significance. In those days, general learning theory was popular. Workers

viii Preface

were inclined to assume that the laws of memory must be the same for all ages and that, consequently, developmental studies were of little more than descriptive value. This prevailing view was summarized as early as 1952 in Deese's textbook Psy­chology of Learning: "Certainly there is very little novel or new information which comes out of this research." Keppel stated a similar opinion in his review: "The developmental study, per se, is probably of little value to the verbal-learning theorist unless differential results are to be expected by theory." This opinion was, however, more a consequence of the fact that then-current theories (e.g., general learning theory) made no provision for developmental variables than it was a consequence of the intrinsic triviality of developmental research. Indeed, investigators were exhorted to formulate uniquely developmental theories in Keppel's review.

During the 1970s, an extensive literatt!te on memory development in infants, children, and the aged began to accumulate. To many of us, this trend first became unmistakable at the 1975 meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development in Denver. Whereas reports of memory research had previously been limited to occasional papers and symposia, such reports occupied a solid chunk of the 1975 program. By 1977, the first "advances" volume in the area, Kail and Hagen's Perspectives on the Development of Memory and Cognition, had been published. Today, memory-development articles are a routine feature of most issues of de­velopmental journals. Importantly, developmental articles now appear regularly in the mainstream adult-memory journals. Judging from its cumulative impact, we doubt that very many contemporary researchers, whether experimentalist or de­velopmentalist, would claim that "very little novel or new information" accrues from such work or that the findings of developmental studies are "probably of little value" to memory theorists.

The literature has now become so extensive as to pose serious problems of selection and organization for reviewers and editors. As we surveyed this literature, we concluded that a case can be made to the effect that most current work tends to fall into one or the other of two broad categories: research on basic memory-development processes and research on the more cognitive aspects of memory development. Roughly speaking, the first category includes studies that are designed to illuminate fundamental dimensions of memory development (e.g., encoding, retrieval), to formulate or test basic theoretical principles, and to deal with measurement ques­tions. Research in the second category, on the other hand, focuses on such issues as the more complex forms of memory (e.g., consciously imposed strategies), the use of memory concepts to explicate cognitive development, and the use of memory concepts in applied contexts (e.g., the psychology of instruction). The coverage in this volume is restricted to the first category. Work in the second category forms the subject matter of the companion volume.

The "basic processes" on which contributions appear in this book are retrieval development, encoding development, the development of organization in long-term memory, the relative contributions of storage and retrieval factors to memory de­velopment, the measurement of processing time in memory development, the de­velopment of short-term memory, and methodological issues in the study of memory changes within aged populations. In Chapter 1, Ackerman examines theory and

Preface ix

research concerned with the presumed retrieval deficits that children show on tra­ditional long-term memory tasks. He also reviews findings from a program of research that seeks to test various theories of retrieval deficit. Ackerman argues that some influential adult models of retrieval (encoding specificity and generate-rec­ognize) are inadequate to account for developmental data, and he proposes a new interpretation based on the notion of the ability of a cue to "describe" information that is stored in memory. In Chapter 2, Anooshian and Siegel consider current work on children's encoding of spatial information, especially the sort of naturalistic spatial encoding that is usually called cognitive mapping. They discuss a variety of ways in which the representation of cognitive maps might properly be said to develop. They formulate eight propositions that are intended to describe both the state of the art in cognitive mapping research and the nature of development in this area.

Age change in measures of organization in long-term memory is one of the most extensively researched topics in the memory-development literature. That such organization increases with age seems obvious enough from the fact that scores on measures of so-called secondary organization (e.g., subjective organization in free recall of unrelated items, category clustering in free recall of categorized lists) increase during childhood and adolescence. The most common explanation has been that the development of deliberate, effortful organizational strategies, especially strategies that are imposed at the time of encoding, is responsible. However, Bjork­lund argues in Chapter 3 that organization is largely an automatic process and, consequently, that the development of organization is the result of age changes in automatic rather than strategic processes. In particular, Bjorklund maintains that developmental differences in the structure of semantic memory are more important than developmental differences in the use of organizational strategies. In Chapter 4, Brainerd discusses the problem of how to factor the relative contributions to memory development of variables that are responsible for getting traces into memory (storage) and variables that are responsible for getting them out again (retrieval). It is suggested that previous failures to resolve this problem are consequences of the fact that it has been treated as a problem in experimental design when, actually, it is a problem in measurement theory that requires the formulation of explicit mathematical models of storage and retrieval. Recent model-based techniques for disentangling storage and retrieval development are reviewed along with their re­spective data bases. Among other things, experimental applications of these models point to an early "storage sensitive" period of development during the preschool and early elementary school years, followed by a "retrieval sensitive" period during later elementary school and adolescence.

In Chapter 5, Dempster surveys the state of our knowledge about the development of short-term memory. Current substantive issues in this literature are summarized with special reference to influential theories of short-term memory and to paradigms that purport to measure short-term memory. Attention is also given to the currently controversial question of whether the development of short-term memory is inti­mately involved in the development of higher cognition. In Chapter 6, Kail analyzes some of the uses of temporal measures of memory in the study of memory devel-

x Preface

opment. Historically, investigators have studied memory tasks on which children show high rates of error (e.g., recall of unrelated lists of words). There are many other tasks, however, on which virtually errorless performance can be expected from even very young children, the most familiar examples being paradigms that focus narrowly on the retrieval of some simple fact or procedure from long-term memory (e.g., numeral comparison, sentence verification). Kail points out that, relatively speaking, such tasks have been neglected in memory-development re­search, and he discusses ways in which response time measures can be used to elucidate development in these situations. Kail also reviews evidence bearing on life-span curves for response-time data.

Finally, in Chapter 7, Salthouse and Kausler probe a literature that has been fraught with methodological and measurement problems, the literature on memory development during late adulthood. Their analysis is organized around questions of the internal and external validity of memory research with aged subjects. Salthouse and Kausler focus on specific dilemmas in such research (e.g., control and iden­tification of subject characteristics), and they present possible paths to solution. They conclude that while a variety of methodological problems threatens the internal validity of most gerontological memory research, there are grounds for optimism when it comes to the generalizability of such research to everyday remembering (external validity).

Charles J. Brainerd Michael Pressley

Contents

Chapter 1 Children's Retrieval Deficit ................................. . Brian P. Ackerman

Current Accounts of Children's Retrieval Deficit.............. 1 Descriptions: A Model of Memory Retrieval.................. 12 The Research Program......................................... 14 Constraints on Descriptive Power. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 General Discussion ............................................ 38 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Chapter 2 From Cognitive to Procedural Mapping..................... 47 Linda J. Anooshian and Alexander W. Siegel

Proposition 1: The Study of Cognitive Mapping Is Now an Active Pluralistic Enterprise ................................... 49 Proposition 2: The Cognitive Mapping Enterprise Has Tended to Operate on Its Own, in Relative Isolation From Other Relevant Research Domains ................................... 60 Proposition 3: The Study of Cognition and Cognitive Development Is More Mature Than the Study of Cognitive Mapping............................... ........................ 62 Proposition 4: Spatial Representation Is Paradigmatic of Nonspatial Thought............................................ 65

xii Contents

Proposition 5: The Cognitive Mapping Enterprise Can Profit From the Activities of Cognitive Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Proposition 6: Emotions Play a Significant Role in Both Spatial and Nonspatial Thought................................ 72 Proposition 7: Cognitive Processing Has a Heavier Emotional Component in Early Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Proposition 8: Emotional Agenda Have Greater Priority Than Cognitive Agenda Early in Development ...................... 85 Epilogue: Cognitive Development Among Cognitive Mappers. .... ....... ......... ..... ......... .......... ..... ..... 87 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Chapter 3 The Role of Conceptual Knowledge in the Development of Organization in Children's Memory......................... 103 David F. Bjorklund

The Development of Conceptual Knowledge.................. 104 The Development of Organization in Children's Memory. . . . . . 117 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

Chapter 4 Model-Based Approaches to Storage and Retrieval Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Charles J. Brainerd

Why Models? .. ..... ....... ..... .. ..... .. .. ........ ... .. ..... .. 145 A Short-Tenn Memory Model................................. 157 A Long-Tenn Memory Model................................. 166 A Retention Model............................................ 183 Storage and Retrieval: The Developmental Picture............. 190 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 Appendix ...................................................... 201

Chapter 5 Short-Term Memory Development in Childhood and Adolescence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Frank N. Dempster

Theoretical Issues and Controversies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 The Development of Short-Tenn Memory..................... 221 Summary and Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

Contents xiii

Chapter 6 Interpretation of Response Time in Research on the Development of Memory and Cognition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Robert Kail

Decomposing Reaction Times ................................. 251 Growth Functions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 Practice.. . . . . . .. .. .. . . . . . . . . . .. . . .. . . . .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 263 The Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Concluding Remarks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272 Appendix...................................................... 276

Chapter 7 Memory Methodology in Maturity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Timothy A. Salthouse and Donald H. Kausler

Memory Classification Scheme ................................ 280 Establishing Phenomena-Internal Validity.................... 282 The Question of Generalizability-External Validity........... 298 Sampling Considerations-Subject Selection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309

Author Index............................................................... 313

Subject Index............................................................... 321

Contributors

Brian P. Ackerman Department of Psychology , University of Delaware , Newark, Delaware 19711, U.S.A.

Linda J. Anooshian Department of Psychology, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas 78284, U.S.A.

David F. Bjorklund Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida 33431, U.S.A.

Charles J. Brainerd Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmon­ton, Alberta T6G 2E9, Canada

Frank N. Dempster College of Education, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Nevada 89154, U.S.A.

Robert Kail Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, U.S.A.

Donald H. Kausler Department of Psychology, University of Missouri, Colum­bia, Missouri 65211, U.S.A.

Timothy A. Salthouse Department of Psychology, University of Missouri, Co­lumbia, Missouri 65211, U.S.A.

Alexander W. Siegel Department of Psychology, University of Houston, Hous­ton, Texas 77004, U.S.A.