Children's Awareness of the Interaction of Person, Task, and Strategy Variables in Memory and Communication

Abstract

Children's awareness of how different variables (presented separately and in combination) influence memory and communicative performance was investigated. Also assessed was whether this awareness follows the same pattern of development across memory and communication. The variables tested were (a) person (who is doing the remembering or communicating), (b) task (what is to be remembered or communicated), and (c) strategy (how to remember or communicate). Eighteen 4-, 5- and 7-year-old children were asked to judge the difficulty of a memory or communication task based on variations in one variable only, two variables together, and all three variables simultaneously. Children's performance did not differ when their knowledge of the separate effects of the variables was assessed, but when children's knowledge of the interactions of variables was assessed, their performance differed significantly. Five- and 7-year-olds understood the way in which two and three variables interact to affect cognitive performance, but 4-year-olds did not. Children's performance seems to be the same across the cognitive domains of memory and communication.