The Effect of Organization Training on Children's Free Recall of Category Items

Moely, Barbara E.; Jeffrey, Wendell E.

doi:10.2307/1127759

Cited by 26 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…However, our demonstration that multiple sources of evidence (conceptual, perceptual, linguistic, and spatial) can each motivate memory expansion in untrained infants will help constrain the problem space and provide data that will be valuable in evaluating any future algorithmic proposals. Second, the result that 14-month-old infants can use hierarchical reorganization to expand memory, whereas much older, preschool-aged children often need explicit instruction to do so (20)(21)(22), suggests that the voluntary control of memory reorganization likely undergoes significant developmental change. Future work will be needed to understand shifts in the endogenous versus exogenous control of memory reorganization.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Five-year-old children can hierarchically structure memory if provided explicit instruction (20)(21)(22), raising the possibility that this process is a cultural construction acquired through explicit teaching. Infants have been shown to group items based on perceptual or statistical features (23)(24)(25), but such grouping does not truly expand item-based memory limits because it fails to preserve representations of the groups' individual components.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity

Feigenson

Halberda

2008

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

114

117

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Adults can expand their limited working memory capacity by using stored conceptual knowledge to chunk items into interrelated units. For example, adults are better at remembering the letter string PBSBBCCNN after parsing it into three smaller units: the television acronyms PBS, BBC, and CNN. Is this chunking a learned strategy acquired through instruction? We explored the origins of this ability by asking whether untrained infants can use conceptual knowledge to increase memory. In the absence of any grouping cues, 14-month-old infants can track only three hidden objects at once, demonstrating the standard limit of working memory. In four experiments we show that infants can surpass this limit when given perceptual, conceptual, linguistic, or spatial cues to parse larger arrays into smaller units that are more efficiently stored in memory. This work offers evidence of memory expansion based on conceptual knowledge in untrained, preverbal subjects. Our findings demonstrate that without instruction, and in the absence of robust language, a fundamental memory computation is available throughout the lifespan, years before the development of explicit metamemorial strategies.orking memory capacity is severely limited in adults (1-6) and infants (7-11), with both groups able to remember only about three separate items at once. One reason that adults are rarely conscious of this constraint is that we can hierarchically reorganize the to-be-remembered stimuli, thereby increasing the total number of items we can store. For example, the letter string PBSBBCCNN is much easier to recall after recognizing the three familiar television acronyms PBS, BBC, and CNN that comprise it. This chunking entails the use of previously acquired concepts to parse an undivided array into smaller units that are more efficiently stored in memory. The stored representation now has two nested levels: the chunks (the television acronyms) and their components (the letters within each acronym).Hierarchical memory reorganization is widely relied on by adults (12-17), both as an explicit strategy and as an unconscious memory process (14,18,19), but its origins remain a mystery. Five-year-old children can hierarchically structure memory if provided explicit instruction (20)(21)(22), raising the possibility that this process is a cultural construction acquired through explicit teaching. Infants have been shown to group items based on perceptual or statistical features (23-25), but such grouping does not truly expand item-based memory limits because it fails to preserve representations of the groups' individual components. And although infants exhibit greater memory capacity for spatially grouped than ungrouped items (26), this ability differs from classical chunking because it relies on external cues rather than internally stored knowledge. Therefore, it remains unknown how humans attain the ability to expand working memory based on previously acquired knowledge. Here, we tested whether this ability is learned through explicit instruction by examining ...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity

Feigenson

Halberda

2008

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

114

117

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“…After having imposed an exhaustive category-search strategy on children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 for four successive study-recall trials with a categorizable word list, Scribner and Cole (1972) found no generalization to a new word list. Moely and Jeffrey (1974) reported an experiment in which one group of 6 and 7 year olds were given instruction and practice in sorting pictures into categories and producing category labels during study. They then were told to think of the category labels and search them during the test stage.…”

Section: Northwestern University Evanston Illinois 60201mentioning

confidence: 99%

Modifying children’s processing of categorizable information for memory

Hall

Madsen

1978

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

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Twenty children in each of Grades 3 and 5 were given training over nine sessions in the use of organizational strategies for encoding and retrieval. A second group at each age level was given sheer practice on the materials used in the strategy training, and a third group was un~reated. Organizational strategy training resulted in higher levels of recall, clustering, and study organization on posttests in which the children studied an array of categorizable pictures and an array of categorizable words. This was true both for test items from categories and items not used and for those that were used in training. Such training produced greater clustering but not greater recall for an aurally presented list of categorizable words.This experiment is concerned with the modifiability of children's processing of categorizable information. There are a variety of mechanisms that might account for the usual superiority of recall for categorizable vs. unrelated material , varying in their locus (encoding vs. retrieval) and automaticity (automatic vs. strategic). Postman (1972) has described several of these mechanisms and suggested that they each are likely to play some role in situations involving the recall of categorizable items. In the case of children , however, the available data indicate that elementary school age children are relatively deficient in the spontaneous initiation of strategies both for encoding (Neimark, Slotnick, & Ulrich, 1971) and retrieving (Kobasigawa, 1974) categorizable information. Whether such deficiencies are maturationally determined or due to insufficient relevant experiences is a question of interest both from a theoretical and a more immediate practical (educational) view and is the focus of the present study.It seems clear that children at least as young as about 7 years will implement organizational strategies for retrieval (Scribner & Cole , 1972) or for storage (Moely, Olson, Halwes, & Flavell, 1969) of category information when explicitly instructed to do so, but do not do so spontaneously. Can such strategies be acquired by children through training? The evidence to date has been unconvincing. After having imposed an exhaustive category-search strategy on children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 for four successive study-recall trials with a categorizable word list, Scribner and Cole (1972) found no generalization to a new word list. Moely and JeffreyWe are grateful to our research assistants, Cheryl Gay, Jerry Goldman, Lisa Grossman, Gay Hall, Sue Hendricson, and Nancy Naron, and to the school officials, teachers, and students of the Martin Luther King Elementary School in Evanston. The research was supported by Grant OEG·5-7-0051 from the U.S. Office of Education. Requests for reprints should be addressed to James W. Hall, School of Education, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201.(1974) reported an experiment in which one group of 6 and 7 year olds were given instruction and practice in sorting pictures into categories and producing category labels during study. They then were ...

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Language and the Young Child

Howe¹

1975

Learning in Infants and Young Children

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The Effect of Organization Training on Children's Free Recall of Category Items

Cited by 26 publications

References 12 publications

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity

Modifying children’s processing of categorizable information for memory

Language and the Young Child

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