Relationships Between Study Behavior, Object Knowledge, and Recall-Memory Proficiency in Preschool Children

Summary

Forty-eight 3- and 4-year-old children performed a category item production task, two episodic study-recall tasks (one with pictures and replicas of common objects, the other with pictures of common actions), and an incidental recall task for objects on each of two occasions four months apart. Measures of spontaneous verbalizations, physical handling of stimuli, and visual attention paid to stimuli were obtained from videotaped recordings of the children's behaviors in each episodic study-recall task. Most of the overt study measures did not distinguish the age groups, and were not related to individual differences in recall. Object knowledge, measured by the category item production task, was a better predictor of developmental and individual differences in episodic recall. Results were discussed in reference to theoretical explanations of early improvements in verbal recall and the difficulties in examining such accounts in view of the lack of consistency of preschoolers' study and recall behaviors.