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Intentional and unintentional memory in young children: Remembering vs. playing
JOURNAL
OF EXPERIMENTAL
Intentional
CHILD
PSYCHOLOGY
50,
243-258 (1990)
and Unintentional Memory in Young Children: Remembering vs. Playing LAWRENCE University
of North
S. NEWMAN Carolina
at Chapel
Hill
In an exploration of Istomina’s (197.5) paradigm contrasting children’s recall from an involuntary or game-like context with recall from an intentional or lessonlike context, this study investigated the relative efficacy of asking 4- and 5-yearolds “to remember” or “to play with” a set of 16 pictures or toys in a naturalistic or laboratory setting. The children’s behavior and language were measured during two 2-min study phases, after which recall was assessed. Toys promoted different study phase activities and better retention than pictures, asking a child “to remember” a set of toys led to less recall than asking the child “to play” with the toys, and, across all conditions, instructions “to play” and “to remember” elicited differentiated study phase responses but similar levels of retention. QI1990 Academic
Prers.
Inc.
INTRODUCTION The question of intentionality is central for developmental theories of memory. Early memory processing has been described as “involuntary and unintentional” (Zaporozhets & Elkonin, 1971, p. 95), “pre-operational” (Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 211, and “production-deficient” (Moely, Olson, Halwes, & Flavell, 1969, p. 21). Each of these descripThis investigation was completed as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author thanks committee chair Peter A. Ornstein, members Robert B. Cairns and Meredith West, and the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their guidance, and Silvija Singh for her insights and support. Much appreciation is expressed to the principals, teachers, parents, and children of Immaculate School, Wonderlane Preschool, Parkwood Baptist Church Day Care Program (all of Durham, NC), and Olin T. Binkley Preschool, in Chapel Hill, NC, for their participation. The author also thanks Paul Thompson for his assistance with the statistical analyses and Elizabeth Levy and Leon Smith for their help with data collection and data reduction. This research was funded in part by research grant HD 08549 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The findings described here were presented at the 88th meeting of the American Psychological Association in Montreal, Canada, in September, 1980. Requests for reprints should be sent to Lawrence S. Newman, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, St. Francis Medical Center, 45th Street (off Penn Avenue), Pittsburgh, PA 15201. 243 0022-0%5/90 $3.00 Copyright Q 1990 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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tions implies that the young child’s ability to voluntarily marshal1 effective memory strategies is limited. According to the production deficiency hypothesis, for instance, many j-year-old children cannot respond to instructions “to remember” by activating available conceptual skills, even though such skills may be present and activated by other means, e.g., training children in rehearsal (Flavell, Beach, & Chinsky, 1966; Ornstein, Naus. & Stone, 1977) or in semantic sorting (Moely et al., 1969). Perhaps out of their own response to anecdotal or observational impressions that even young children at least sometimes are capable of retaining cued information, resarchers have questioned whether preschoolers will show better retention when less aware of a memory demand, as in an involuntary memory task. In 1948, Istomina reported that Soviet preschoolers retained more information in the context of a shopping game than in a lesson format (Istomina, 1975). In a companion article, 4-year-olds demonstrated self-control, as measured by “refraining from making any movements,” to an apparently greater degree when pretending to be a guard in the game “Factory and Guards” than when instructed by an adult to “assume the pose of a guard” as long as possible (Manuilenko, 1975). Although both American (Weissberg & Paris, 1986) and German (Schneider & Brun, 1987) replications found the increases in age-related recall as described by Istomina, neither replication found that incidental memory exceeded intentional memory for any of the age groups. The German replication found no significant difference between the game and lesson conditions, and the American study-which included two repetitions of the list of to-be-remembered items, unlike the Soviet or German studies-found the lesson condition to produce a higher level of retention than the game condition. A principal flaw in Istomina’s methodology was that the children appear to have been allowed to obtain repetitions of the to-be-remembered items-which they sought more often in the game condition and which, not surprisingly, may have been directly related to greater recall in the game than in the lesson format (cf., Schneider & Brun, 1987). This methodological flaw was intentionally repeated in the near-exact replication of Istomina’s experiment by Schneider and Brun (1987), and retention patterns were consistent with Istomina’s findings. In a subsequent experiment, Schneider and Brun (1987) allowed the items to be repeated only once for children in both conditions, this time obtaining no significant differences in retention between the game and the lesson conditions at either 4 or 6 years of age. Nonsignificant trends at both ages-particularly the younger age-did favor the game activity, however. Recent studies have shown a surprising mnemonic competence of young children. Although the benefits of mnemonic strategies on recall
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have typically not been observed until about age 6, the activation of mnemonic strategies in response to the instruction “to remember” have been demonstrated at age 4 (Sodian, Schneider, & Perlmutter, 1986). Even toddlers as young as l&months-old have been observed to employ strategy-like behavior when instructed in a naturalistic setting to remember a toy’s location (DeLoache, Cassidy, & Brown, 1985). In summarizing these findings, Wellman (1988) has suggested that preschoolers be credited with having mnemonic strategies, yet viewed as such novices to the task of remembering that their strategies are more faulty than effective. The central purpose of this study was to investigate the specific conditions which promote mnemonically favorable activities in young children, and to assess how such conditions and activities affect retention. Whereas the Istomina work attemped to assess recall relative to the strictness or playfulness of the setting, her work was confounded not only methodologically but also conceptually, in that the different settings were assumed to have differential motivational effects on the children. By omitting the Soviet means-end concern, the current study focuses on the effects of environmental structure on recall through the establishment of five conditions providing graded contextual shifts from a strict laboratory environment to a free-play environment. One objective was to compare what children do with and how well they later remember materials which they have encountered in the course of play and in the course of a deliberate memory task. It was expected that the preschoolers would engage in different behaviors when asked to play as when asked to remember, and that children asked to play with toys would spontaneously activate more mnemonically useful behaviors and would thereby later remember more toys than children who were asked to remember the toys. Because children are accustomed to playing with toys, and not with pictures or other items, the prediction was limited to the condition which employed toys as stimulus materials. An additional aim of the investigation was to determine the role played by the materials in facilitating retention. In play or in recall preparation, children’s activities may vary as a function of the stimulus materials (Cole, Frankel, & Sharp, 1971). Because compatibility and familiarity facilitate deeper processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972), “toys” were expected to elicit more mnemonically useful activities, and hence greater retention, than “pictures of toys.” Finally, the setting in which instructions are given may affect recall performance. On the one hand, the typical laboratory setting (e.g., Moely et al., 1969), may be so unfamiliar that the young child’s performance is hampered. Soviet findings repeatedly point to lower recall levels in “academic” than in “play” conditions for preschoolers, despite the reversal of this trend over the elementary school years (Smirnov & Zin-
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chenko, 1969). The laboratory condition of the present study was viewed as an anchor both to the American experimental paradigm (e.g., Moely et al., 1969) and to the Soviet “lesson” format (Istomina, 1975), and was thereby predicted to yield the lowest level of recall of the five conditions. METHOD Design
Subjects in five different groups were asked to recall a list of 16 common items, the conditions and materials varying across the groups. These groups represented four “naturalistic” conditions, which form a 2 (pictures vs. toys) X 2 (“recall” vs. “play” instructions) factorial design, and a single “laboratory” condition, which can be considered an extra cell. Subjects
Seventy-four middle-class 4- and 5-year-old children (mean age = 57.6 months) from four preschools in the Chapel Hill and Durham, NC, area participated in the study. Because the Laboratory condition was conceptualized as an adjunctive condition, only 10 subjects were included here. There were 16 subjects in each of the remaining groups, approximately one-half of whom were male and one-half female. Children were assigned randomly to each of the five conditions, within the restriction of sample size for the Laboratory condition. Materials
and Apparatus
The to-be-remembered items were presented to the children either as pictures or as objects. The pictures were black-and-white line drawings on 3 x 5 in. cards, each containing a single item. The objects were miniature plastic, ceramic, or cloth toys. A white cloth, upon which was drawn a grid of 3 x 3 in. squares, was used to define the area on which the items were to remain throughout the session. To control for list-specific effects, two 16-item recall lists were constructed. Approximately one-half of the children in each group were assigned to each list. The items used in list I were: banana, grapes, lemon, pear; bowl, fork, plate, pot; elephant, lion, pig, zebra; coat, hat, shoe, shorts. The items for list II were: carrot, corn, peanut, pumpkin; bed, chest of drawers, lamp, sofa; helicopter, motorcycle, train, truck; bee, butterfly, ladybug, worm. These lists were well-known to the children who served as subjects. In pilot research, each list was correctly named by at least 80% of 15 children drawn from a similar sample as those in this experiment. Furthermore, 12 of 15 pilot children were able to sort the items into groups with two errors or less.
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Ail testing took place in the testing room of a mobile laboratory. The testing room, which contained a videotape camera, mounted on a tripod, and two audio microphones, was separated from an observation room by a one-way mirror. Procedure
Each subject was tested individually and received a single practice trial, two study periods, one recall test, and one final sorting test. The practice trial allowed the child to become acclimated to the general procedures of the experiment. The experimenter handed each of the six practice items to the child, asked the child to name the item and to place it on the white cloth. With the naming procedure complete, the experimenter gave the child one of two instructions. For the “recall” conditions, the experimenter asked the child “to move the items around any way you want to, to help you remember them. Do all the things you know of to try to remember these (pictures, toys).” For the “play” conditions, the experimenter said, “Do anything you would like with these (pictures, toys). You can play with them and move them around anywhere on this cloth.” For the practice trial, children were allowed 1 min to play with or to try to remember the items. If, during this study period, a child was distracted for 10 s or more, the experimenter repeated part of the instructions, saying. for example, “Are you trying to remember (playing with) these (pictures, toys)?” Otherwise, the experimenter avoided talking with the child, and gave brief responses to any questions. To prevent anticipation of recall by subjects receiving “play” instructions, no recall test was given with the practice trial. A similar procedure was employed for each of the two 2-min study periods. To avoid order-specific effects, half of the subjects received one order of presentation for the first study period, and a second order for the second study period, with the other half of the subjects receiving a reverse treatment. Following the second study period, the items were covered with a large cloth, and recall was requested. Subjects were asked, “Now tell me the names of all of those (pictures, toys) you’ve been (trying to remember, playing with).” To ensure that the children in the different groups had roughly similar knowledge of the categories used, the children were asked to categorically sort the items. To avoid interference with performance on other tasks, this sorting task was requested after the recall test was completed. For the sorting task, the examiner laid out four blank pieces of paper and asked the subjects to “put together the (pictures, toys) that are alike, that go together, that belong together.” When the subject picked up the first item, the experimenter cued, “What (pictures, toys) go with that?” After the sorting task, the child was praised for his or her overall performance, and thanked for participating in the study.
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The procedures for the Laboratory condition differed somewhat from that for the four “naturalistic” conditions. For the Laboratory condition, the testing room contained two chairs, one for the experimenter and one for the subject, and a table, across which the items were presented. Once the items were presented, the experimenter left the room; even if a child was distracted for 10 s or more, the experimenter remained out of the room, and made no attempt to refocus the child’s attenton on the task. In the “naturalistic” conditions, the experimenter and the subject sat on the floor, and the experimenter remained present for the study periods. Measures
Five different types of measures were obtained in order to assess each subject’s performance during the session. Three of these measures assessed performance during the study period, one during the recall task, and one during the final sorting task. For finegrained analyses of study period performance, “behavioral observations” focused on the child’s interactions with the stimuli, whereas “language observations” assessed the child’s vocalizations. A higher-order description of the child’s general “approach-to-task” examined the extent to which the instructions were followed, with particular interest in whether children asked “to remember” engaged in memory-appropriate behaviors and whether children asked “to play” engaged in playful behaviors. This analysis of the children’s approach-to-task was not analytically independent of the behavior and language analyses. However, the analyses differed in that the behavior and language analyses focused on brief events, whereas the approach-to-task analysis looked at the flow of behavior over a 15-s duration. Approach-to-task. In order to assess the children’s understanding of the instructions, videotape records were analyzed, with judgments made at each 15-s interval, according to the following 5-item scheme: A. Study: rehearsing, sorting, or otherwise attempting to remember the items. B. Investigate: looking at an item, usually while touching it, such as when exploring its characteristics. C. Functional play: moving an item or items around (e.g., collecting or banging the pictures), or engaging the properties of an item (e.g., rolling the truck, eating the banana, unbuttoning the coat). D. Free play: employing an item or items in unique ways. Here the child goes beyond the functional properties of the items (e.g., putting the shoe on the elephant, or having the ladybug ride the motorcycle). E. Distraction: not attending to the stimulus materials. In addition, certain segments could not be coded because of distortions or interference in the videotape records, These 15-s segments were classified as “poor video.”
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Behavioral observations. During the study periods, those behaviors which reflected the subject’s interactions with the stimulus materials were recorded and later verified from videotape records for 70 subjects. Using a behavior coding scale consisting of seven categories, judgments were made every 5 s of the study period. The behavioral categories were: A. No contact: not contacting any of the items, such as when distracted or in a natural pause in activity. B. Call: saying the name of an item without contacting it. C. Handle: contacting an item but not attending to its properties or functions, or contacting an item without looking at it (e.g., throwing, banging, or shuffling the items). D. Scan: contacting and looking at more than one item during a single 5-s block, but not attending to the items’ properties or functions. E. Focus: contacting and attending to the properties or functions of a single item for most of a 5-s block. F. Combine: contacting and attending to the properties or functions of two or more items for most of a 5-s block. G. Cluster: placing three or four items of a single conceptual category together. Language observations. Tape recordings of the study period were reviewed with each language event transcribed as verbatim as possible. These events were then categorized according to the following scheme: A. Irrelevant vocalization: discussing content irrelevant to the task. B. Nonlinguistic utterances: making noises appropriate to the activity (e.g., “whoosh” as the child spreads out the pictures). C. Naming: saying the name of an item (e.g., “truck” or “this is a truck”). Whereas calling, described above in the behavioral observations, occurs only when a child names an item without touching it, naming occurs whether or not the item is touched. D. Elaboration: talking about one item (e.g., “I’m squeezing the lemon) or talking about two items of different conceptual categories. E. Embedding: talking about an item as an examplar of a conceptual category (e.g., “the banana is a fruit”) or talking about a conceptual category (e.g., “now all the animals are in the pasture”). The remaining two measures assessed performance during the recall task and during the final sorting task. The recall protocols were scored for the number of items correctly recalled. Sorting protocols were measured using the Cohen, Sakoda, and Bousfield (1954) ratio of repetition (RR) index, a quantitative measure of categorization. Interobserver Reliability Interobserver reliability was calculated for the approach-to-task and study period behavior categories from the videotapes of both trials of 20 subjects. The videotapes were viewed independently by the experi-
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menter and an undergraduate assistant who also participated in the actual data collection. Interobserver reliability was assessed as the proportion of agreements divided by the sum of agreements and disagreements (i.e., A/A + D) where, for a given category, agreements represent the total frequency of similar judgments by the two judges and disagreements included the total frequency of dissimilar judgments. According to this method, reliability for the study period behavior categories was as follows: no contact (.89), calling (.96), handling (.92), scanning (.71), focusing (.91), combining (.81), and clustering (.72). Because scanning by definition occurred for a very brief duration, some disagreements are attributable to the recording of some scanning events in different 5-s blocks by the two observers. The lower reliability for grouping is related to the rarity of this event. Interobserver reliability for the approach-totask categories was: studying (.79), investigation (.80), functional play (.65). and free play (.85). The lower reliability for these categories relative to the study period behavior categories reflects the difficulty of making higher-order judgments of continuous behavior. RESULTS
An initial multivariate analysis of variance was conducted across each of the three sets of behavioral variables-the five approach-to-task variables, the seven study period behaviors, and the five study period language variables-for each of the principal hypotheses. Given significance for these multivariate clusters, univariate findings were then inspected. Because the multivariate analyses found no effects of list, order of presentation, or school which the child attended, the data were collapsed across these factors. Separate analyses revealed no main or interaction effects of gender and condition in the children’s approach-to-task or study period language behaviors. However, analysis of the study period behaviors did yield a significant interaction of gender with condition; these data were analyzed separately for girls and boys. In the presentation of findings, those effects which were tested but found to be nonsignificant are typically not listed. Approach-to-Task
Judgments for the approach-to-task were made every 15 s from videoand audio-recordings of the study period sessions. Across both trials, 16 judgments were made for each subject. If, during a given interval, the record was unclear, that interval was considered missing data, with a total of 10 subjects omitted. These behavior patterns were examined in the context of a between-groups analysis of variance with a special contrast of the three groups receiving instructions “to try to remember” (Laboratory, Pictures-Recall, and Toys-Recall) with the two groups re-
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TABLE 1 APPROACH-TO-TASKBEHAVIORSBY GROUP Group (n)
Study
Investigate
Functional play
Laboratory (IO) Pictures-Recall (16) Pictures-Play t 16) Toys-Recall (16) Toys-Play (16)
3.500 4.625 0.313 4.438 0.875
0.600 4.188 5.813 3.063 2.188
0.400 I .875 3.625 1.813 3.750
Note.
Free play Distraction 0.000 0.813 0.875 0.625 5.813
5.!200 2.500 2.313 3.063 I.688
Poor video 5.600 2.000 3.063 3.000 1.688
The values represent mean number of 15-s intervals of each approach-to-task
behavior.
ceiving instructions “to play” (Pictures-Play and Toys-Play). The error term was based on the 64 included subjects across the five groups. As seen in Table 1, those children given “recall” instructions studied the items significantly more than those given “play” instructions, F(1, 59) = 15.384, p < .OOl, but there was no effect of instructions on the amount of time spent investigating the properties of the items. However, the “play” groups were less distracted, F(1, 59) = 14.620, p < .OOl, and engaged in more functional play, F(1. 59) = 7.168, p < .OOl, and more free play, F(1, 59) = 14.885, p < .OOl, than did the “recall” groups. These differences indicate that the children responded appropriately to the instructions given, with those given “recall” instructions engaging in mnemonically appropriate behaviors, and those given “play” instructions engaging in playful behaviors. Study Period Activities
For the analysis of study period behaviors, the child’s continuous interaction with the stimulus materials was divided into 5-s intervals. These data represent the combined frequencies across the two study periods because preliminary analyses revealed that only one category of study period activities differed between the first and the second study period. The sole category that did differ across study periods was the children’s handling of the items, which was somewhat higher during the second than during the first study period, F(1, 69) = 4.26, p < .05. Table 2 displays the mean frequency of 5-s intervals in which female and male subjects in each condition engaged in the seven study period behaviors. The error terms for study period analyses were based on the variability across the 10 cells. Because videotape recordings were not available for all subjects, the error terms for these behavior analyses are based on 70 subjects, including 38 boys and 32 girls. The multivariate data for each gender were subjected to a betweengroups analysis of variance which included four special contrasts. One
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TABLE STUDY
PERIOD
2
BEHAVIORS
BY GROUP -____-.-
Group-gender
(n)
No contact
Call
Handle
Scan Focus Combine
Cluster ____.0.00 0.00 3.57 0.00 0.00 0.38 I.14 0.25 I .88 2.75
Laboratory-female (3) 25.33 16.00 2.33 3.00 1.33 0.00 Laboratory-male (7) 25. I7 2.17 I .83 10.83 7.67 0.00 Pictures-Recall-female (7) 8.57 0.71 3.71 14.29 16.43 0.57 Pictures-Recall-male (9) 12.75 0.38 13.62 9.25 10.88 0.62 Pictures-Play-female (7) 4.86 0.00 9.29 10.71 18.86 3.64 Pictures-Play-male (9) 7.50 0.00 10.12 7.12 21.62 1.00 Toys-Recall-female (8) 12.29 0.00 I .43 13.71 17.14 0.79 Toys-Recall-male (8) 9.50 7.38 1.50 4.62 21.88 3.00 Toys-Play-female (8) 4.50 0.00 0.12 3.88 30.00 7.56 Toys-Play-male (8) 2.25 0.00 0.38 5.38 23.75 12.94 -_____ ___________ Note. The values represent mean number of 5-s intervals of each study period behavior. Frequencies are based on the number of reliable videotape recordings per cell.
contrast compared the Laboratory condition with the four “naturalistic” conditions. The remaining contrasts examined differences among the four naturalistic conditions, comparing the main effects of intructions and of materials, and the interaction of the effects of instructions and materials. Multivariate analyses found that both boys, F(7, 27) = 5.457, p < .OOl, and girls, F(7, 21) = 16.017, p < .OOl, behaved differently in the laboratory than in the naturalistic conditions. Boys, F(1, 33) = 34.46, p < .OOl. and girls, F(I, 27) = 10.98, p < .Ol contacted the items less in the laboratory condition, and both boys, F(1, 33) = 5.95, p < .05, and girls, F(1, 27) = 12.50, p < .Ol focused more in the naturalistic conditions. Boys, F(1, 33) = 5.85, p < .05 combined items more in the naturalistic than in the laboratory condition. Girls, F(1, 27) = 90.30, p < .OOl called more in the laboratory than in the naturalistic conditions. Within the naturalistic conditions, multivariate contrasts revealed no interaction effects of instructions with materials for either gender. No significant multivariate effect of materials was found for girls. Boys, F(7. 27) = 7.21, p < .OOl, did interact with the two types of material differentially, however, both manipulating, F(l, 33) = 10.77, p < .Ol, and combining, F(l, 33) = 24.60, p < .Ol the toys more than the pictures. Multivariate contrasts of the naturalistic “recall” versus “play” conditions were significant for boys, F(7, 27) = 2.84, p < .05, and for girls, F(7, 21) = 3.70, p < .Ol. When asked to “play,” boys engaged in fewer periods of noncontact, F(1, 33) = 7.23. p < .Ol, less calling, F(1. 33) = 4.96, p < .05, and more combining than when asked to “recall.” Girls engaged in less scanning, F( 1, 27) = 4.30, p < .05, more focusing, F(l. 21) = 5.22, p < .05, and more combining, F(l, 21) = 7.95, p < .Ol, when asked to “play” than when asked to “recall.”
INTENTIONAL
AND UNINTENTIONAL TABLE
STUDY
Group (n) Laboratory (8) Pictures-Recall (14) Pictures-Play (15) Toys-Recall (14) Toys-Play (16)
Irrelevant vocalization 1.50 4.71 5.27 3.43 3.00
PERIOD
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3
LANGUAGE
BY GROUP
Nonlinguistic utterance
Naming
0.00 0.71 0.00 0.07 1.62
MEMORY
19.12 16.21 1.20 23.57 2.00
Elaboration 0.00 0.14 1.00 0.88 5.88
Embedding 0.00 0.28 0.00 0.00 0.94
Note. The values represent mean frequencies for each group. Frequencies are based on the number of reliable audiotape recordings per cell.
Table 3 summarizes the verbal activities for subjects in each condition. Analyzed with the same contrasts as the behavioral data, the error term was based on 67 subjects only, with seven subjects omitted due to difficulties with the audiotape records but no gender effects. Note first that irrelevant vocalizations occurred at a similarly low frequency across the five conditions. Second, nonlinguistic utterances were rare; however. because these utterances occurred somewhat more frequently in the Toys-Play condition than in any other condition, an interaction of stimulus materials and instructions was obtained, F( 1, 62) = 4.3 11, p < .05. Third, naming was observed significantly more often in recall than in play conditions, F(1, 62) = 25.267, p < .OOl. Fourth, the high frequency of elaboration among Toys-Play subjects resulted in an interaction between materials and instructions, F(1, 62) = 4.913, p < .05. Finally, embedding was rare, and occurred only in the Pictures-Recall and the Toys-Play conditions. These study period data are directly relevant to the major hypotheses underlying this investigation. One of the special contrasts already described examined the main effect of stimulus materials on study period activities. Was the children’s language with pictures and toys markedly different? Yes. Children made more nonlinguistic utterances, F(1, 62) = 4.906, p < .05, as well as more elaborations, F(1, 62) = 9.886, p < .005, when playing with toys than with pictures. An additional pair of special contrasts was employed to test the other two predictions of this investigation. These contrasts compared, first, the Toys-Recall with the ToysPlay conditions, and, second, the Laboratory with the Pictures-Recall conditions. The children who were asked “to try to remember” a set of toys acted differently than those asked “to play with” a set of toys, with significant multivariate contrasts both for boys, F(7, 27) = 3.82, p < .Ol, and for girls, F(7, 21) = 3.17, p < .05. There was significantly more contact, F( 1, 33) = 4.87, p < .05, and more combining, F( 1, 33) = 23.72, p <
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.OOl, when boys were asked to play than when they were asked to remember toys. Girls focused, F(1, 27) = 7.64, p < .05, and combined, F( 1, 27) = 7.78, p < .Ol, more when asked to play than when asked to remember toys. Boys called, F( 1, 33) = 8.99, p < .Ol , and girls scanned, F(1,27) = 4.78, p < .05, more when asked to recall. Across both genders, children asked “to try to remember” the toys named them more than children asked “to play with” toys, F( I, 62) = 17.740, p < .OOl, but those asked “to play” engaged in more nonlinguistic utterances, F( 1, 62) = 8.003, p < .Ol, and more expansions, F(1, 62) = 14.512, p < .OOl. Multivariate analysis revealed no differential use of language under the Laboratory versus the Picture-Recall condition, and no distinctions among the study period behaviors of boys. Girls did behave differentially in the two conditions, F( 1, 21) = 11.26, p < .Ol. including more periods of no contact, F(1, 27) = 7.54, p < .05, more calling, F( I, 27) = 65.12, p < .OOl, and less focusing, F( 1, 27) = 5.93, p < .05 in the Laboratory than in the naturalistic Picture-Recall condition. Red1 Analysis of the recall data indicated no main effects of list, order of presentation, or school that the child attended. Item analyses revealed that, except for three toys, all 32 toys and 32 pictures were recalled at rates between .20 and .80. The toy motorcycle was recalled at a rate of .I7 and the toy pear and pig were recalled at .87. A mixed factorial analysis of the effects of the sex of the child and of condition yielded a main effect for the child’s gender, with girls recalling significantly more items than boys, F( 1, 64) = 4.571, p < .05; however, gender did not interact with conditions. The mean number of items recalled correctly by females and males was 7.97 and 6.58, respectively. The children recalled a mean of 7.50 items in the Laboratory condition, 5.69 in the Pictures-Recall condition, 6.06 in the Pictures-Play condition, 7.44 in the Toys-Recall condition, and 9.44 in the Toys-Play condition. The data were analyzed according to the contrasts employed in the treatment of the study period activities, with the error term based on the variability across the full pool of 74 subjects. As can be seen, recall varied considerably as a function of condition. First, the simple effect of the Toys-Recall and the Toys-Play conditions was significant, F( I, 64) = 4.62, p < .05. The main effect for instructions was in the expected direction, but, across conditions, was not significant. Second, children recalled significantly more items when toys were employed as the stimulus materials than when pictures were used, F(1. 64) = 14.51. p < .OOl. Third, within the naturalistic conditions, the interaction between instructions and materials was not significant. Fourth, recall for the Laboratory condition was not significantly different
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from that of the average of the four naturalistic conditions, nor from the most similar naturalistic condition (Pictures-Recall). Although in the predicted direction, recall for the Toys-Play condition was not significantly higher than that for the Laboratory group. Sorting Task
The sorting task, carried out at the end of the experimental sequence, assessed the children’s knowledge of the list categories. RR, the index of category clustering, has a range from 0.0 to 0.80, with increasing values indicative of greater clustering. Mean RR scores for the Laboratory, Pictures-Recall, Pictures-Play, Toys-Recall, and Toys-Play conditions were 55, .48, .44, .52, and .55, respectively. Because there were no significant differences across the conditions, it is reasonable to assume that differences obtained for the study period activities and for recall are not due to differences in underlying categorical knowledge. DISCUSSION
Instructions “to play with” toys promoted better retention than instructions “to remember” toys. This counter-intuitive effect means that asking a child “to remember” can lead to less recall than merely asking the child “to play.” Why? Inspection of the findings suggests that the effects were mediated by the organizations that children spontaneously imposed on the materials when merely asked to play. Compared to the “remember” groups, the “play” groups engaged in more “functional play,” such as eating the banana or unbuttoning the coat, and more “free play,” such as putting the shoe on the elephant or riding the ladybug on the motorcycle. With toys. the “play” instructions elicited more talking, play noise, physical contact, and examination of individual and small groups of toys than did the “remember” instructions. For instance, the children in the play conditions often narrated their activity, e.g., “I’m squeezing the lemon,” or “I’m putting the shorts with the helicopter,” and sometimes animated their activity with onomatopoeic imitations (e.g., “slurp” while their elephant drank and “bzzzz” while their bee was flying). In an even more complex sequence, one 5-yearold girl told a story about farm animals, and created a “farm scene” organization of the 16 toys, of which she later recalled 12. These qualitative findings confirm the observation of Schneider and Brun (1987) that “the majority of our children seemed to be more interested during the play than during the lesson activities.” The elevated recall found in the Toys-Play condition supports the assumption underlying Istomina’s work-despite its multiple flaws in execution-that certain play situations can be structured to promote greater retention than comparable academic situations. Although the children told “to remember” the toys appeared to interact
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less with the items, of particular importance is that these children consistently engaged in substantial rehearsal-measured in this study as calling and naming behaviors. A modal response to the “to remember” instructions was to name each item one at a time, sometimes repeating the process, primarily attending to a single item at a time. In contrast to Istomina’s contention that preschoolers essentially lack the capacity for voluntary memory, these findings support the more recent view that 4- to j-year-old children do produce mnemonically appropriate strategies when asked to remember (Weissberg & Paris, 1986). It is noteworthy that the effect of instructions was limited to the toy conditions. Across both instructional conditions, toys were recalled better than pictures, which highlights the powerful influence of the stimulus materials on recall performance. The children collected, spread, and shuffled the pictures, but used, combined, told stories about, and made noises with the miniature toys. This finding differs from that of Cole et al. (197 1), who reported no differences when comparing recall for photographs and for objects. An important distinction between the Cole et al. (1971) study and this investigation is that subjects in the Cole et al. (1971) study were allowed no opportunity to handle the items, but subjects in this investigation were encouraged to “move the items around.” It would appear then that 4- and j-year-old children’s level of retention increases when the handling of toy stimuli is a part of study period activities. The third prediction was that the Laboratory condition would yield less interaction with the stimulus materials and therefore less retention than the comparable Pictures-Recall condition. Indeed, the Laboratory condition did evoke less contact with the items. Yet, there was also significantly more rehearsal-with some children appearing to whisper to themselves while looking away from the pictures-and greater recall. The graded increases in depth of processing and consequent retention predicted to accompany the graded shifts from laboratory to free play conditions were not found. Children in the Laboratory condition, specifically, and the “recall” conditions in general were observed to engage in such strategic efforts as rehearsal, and thereby to obtain retention levels which, across all conditions, were not different from the “play” conditions. Although not promoting the rehearsal strategies seen in the “recall” conditions, the Toys-Play condition spontaneously elicited an alternative, apparently deeper, processing of the stimulus information, yielding a retention level higher than its companion condition, ToysRecall. That the toys were categorizable, familiar, and attractive apparently did trigger the children’s engagement, their involuntary memorization, and their subsequent retention. With regard to the “differentiation hypothesis” (Appel, Cooper, McCarrell, Sims-Knight, Yussen, & Flavell, 1972). the present study
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found that preschoolers given instructions “to remember” approached the stimulus items during the study periods in a substantially different manner than those children given “play” instructions. Consistent with recent evidence demonstrating that young children do distinguish between “perceiving” and “memorizing” (Galbraith, Olsen, Duerden, & Harris, 1982), these children’s differentiation of the instructions affected their behavior and language during the study period and their level of retention. A study which compares along a common baseline the ability of preschoolers to differentiate perception, memory, and play instructions is called for. Future research should continue the analysis of the relationship between study phase activities and performance on tests of retention, and attempt to map out the developmental course of intentional and unintentional memory processing. REFERENCES Appel, L. F., Cooper, B. G., McCarrell. N., Sims-Knight. J., Yussen, S., & Flavell, J. H. (1972). The development of the distinction between perceiving and memorizing. Child Del>elopment, 43, 1365- I38 I. Cohen, B. H., Sakoda. J. M., & Bousfield, J. H. (1954). The statistical unalysis of the incidence of clustering in the recall of randomly arranged associates. Technical Report No. IO, University of Connecticut, Contract Nonr 631 (OO), Office of Naval Research. Cole, M., Frankel, F., & Sharp, D. (1971). Development of free recall in children. Developmental
Psychology,
4, 109-123.
Craik. F. 1. M.. & Lockhart, R.S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684. DeLoache, J. S., Cassidy. D. J., & Brown, A. L. (1985). Precursors of young mnemonic strategies in very young children’s memory. Child Development, 56, 125-137. Flavell, J., Beach, D.. & Chinsky, J. (1966). Spontaneous verbal rehearsal in a memory task as a function of age. Child Development, 37, 283-299. Galbraith. R. C., Olsen, S. F., Duerden, D. S., & Harris, W. L. (1982). The differentiation hypothesis: Distinguishing between perceiving and memorizing. American Journal of Psychology,
95, 655-667.
Istomina, Z. M. (1975). The development of voluntary memory in preschool-age children. Soviet
Psychology,
13, 5-64.
Manuilenko, Z. V. (1975). The development of voluntary behavior in preschool-age children. Soviet Psychology, 13, 65-l 16. Moely, B. E., Olson, F. A., Halwes, T. G., & Flavell. J. H. (1969). Production deficiency in young children’s clustered recall. Developmental Psychology, 1, 26-34. Murphy, M. D., & Brown, A. L. (1975). Incidental learning in preschool children as a function of level of cognitive analysis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 19, 509-523. Ornstein, P. A., Naus, M. J., & Stone, B. P. (1977). Rehearsal training and developmental differences in memory. Developmentnl Psychology, 13, 15-24. Piaget, J.. & Inhelder, B. (1973). Memory and intelligence in children. London: Basic Books. Schneider, W., & Brun, H. (1987). The role of context in young children’s memory performance: Istomina revisited. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 333341.
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Smirnov, A. A., & Zinchenko, P. I. (1%9). Problems in the psychology of memory. In M. Cole & I. Maltzman (Eds.), A handbook of contemporary Soviet psychology. New York: Basic Books. Sodian, B., Schneider, W.. & Perlmutter, M. (1986). Recall, clustering, and metamemory in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 41, 395-410. Weissberg, J. A., & Paris, S. G. (1986). Young children’s remembering in different contexts: A replication and reinterpretation of Istomina’s study. Child Development, 57, 11231129. Wellman, H. M. (1988). The early development of memory strategies. In F. E. Weinart & M. Perlmutter (Eds.), Memor?, development: Universal changes and individual differences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Zaporozhets. A. V.. & Elkonin, D. B. (1971). The psychology of preschool children. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. RECEIVED:
March 31, 1988;
REVISED
March 21. 1990.
OF EXPERIMENTAL
Intentional
CHILD
PSYCHOLOGY
50,
243-258 (1990)
and Unintentional Memory in Young Children: Remembering vs. Playing LAWRENCE University
of North
S. NEWMAN Carolina
at Chapel
Hill
In an exploration of Istomina’s (197.5) paradigm contrasting children’s recall from an involuntary or game-like context with recall from an intentional or lessonlike context, this study investigated the relative efficacy of asking 4- and 5-yearolds “to remember” or “to play with” a set of 16 pictures or toys in a naturalistic or laboratory setting. The children’s behavior and language were measured during two 2-min study phases, after which recall was assessed. Toys promoted different study phase activities and better retention than pictures, asking a child “to remember” a set of toys led to less recall than asking the child “to play” with the toys, and, across all conditions, instructions “to play” and “to remember” elicited differentiated study phase responses but similar levels of retention. QI1990 Academic
Prers.
Inc.
INTRODUCTION The question of intentionality is central for developmental theories of memory. Early memory processing has been described as “involuntary and unintentional” (Zaporozhets & Elkonin, 1971, p. 95), “pre-operational” (Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 211, and “production-deficient” (Moely, Olson, Halwes, & Flavell, 1969, p. 21). Each of these descripThis investigation was completed as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author thanks committee chair Peter A. Ornstein, members Robert B. Cairns and Meredith West, and the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their guidance, and Silvija Singh for her insights and support. Much appreciation is expressed to the principals, teachers, parents, and children of Immaculate School, Wonderlane Preschool, Parkwood Baptist Church Day Care Program (all of Durham, NC), and Olin T. Binkley Preschool, in Chapel Hill, NC, for their participation. The author also thanks Paul Thompson for his assistance with the statistical analyses and Elizabeth Levy and Leon Smith for their help with data collection and data reduction. This research was funded in part by research grant HD 08549 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The findings described here were presented at the 88th meeting of the American Psychological Association in Montreal, Canada, in September, 1980. Requests for reprints should be sent to Lawrence S. Newman, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, St. Francis Medical Center, 45th Street (off Penn Avenue), Pittsburgh, PA 15201. 243 0022-0%5/90 $3.00 Copyright Q 1990 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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tions implies that the young child’s ability to voluntarily marshal1 effective memory strategies is limited. According to the production deficiency hypothesis, for instance, many j-year-old children cannot respond to instructions “to remember” by activating available conceptual skills, even though such skills may be present and activated by other means, e.g., training children in rehearsal (Flavell, Beach, & Chinsky, 1966; Ornstein, Naus. & Stone, 1977) or in semantic sorting (Moely et al., 1969). Perhaps out of their own response to anecdotal or observational impressions that even young children at least sometimes are capable of retaining cued information, resarchers have questioned whether preschoolers will show better retention when less aware of a memory demand, as in an involuntary memory task. In 1948, Istomina reported that Soviet preschoolers retained more information in the context of a shopping game than in a lesson format (Istomina, 1975). In a companion article, 4-year-olds demonstrated self-control, as measured by “refraining from making any movements,” to an apparently greater degree when pretending to be a guard in the game “Factory and Guards” than when instructed by an adult to “assume the pose of a guard” as long as possible (Manuilenko, 1975). Although both American (Weissberg & Paris, 1986) and German (Schneider & Brun, 1987) replications found the increases in age-related recall as described by Istomina, neither replication found that incidental memory exceeded intentional memory for any of the age groups. The German replication found no significant difference between the game and lesson conditions, and the American study-which included two repetitions of the list of to-be-remembered items, unlike the Soviet or German studies-found the lesson condition to produce a higher level of retention than the game condition. A principal flaw in Istomina’s methodology was that the children appear to have been allowed to obtain repetitions of the to-be-remembered items-which they sought more often in the game condition and which, not surprisingly, may have been directly related to greater recall in the game than in the lesson format (cf., Schneider & Brun, 1987). This methodological flaw was intentionally repeated in the near-exact replication of Istomina’s experiment by Schneider and Brun (1987), and retention patterns were consistent with Istomina’s findings. In a subsequent experiment, Schneider and Brun (1987) allowed the items to be repeated only once for children in both conditions, this time obtaining no significant differences in retention between the game and the lesson conditions at either 4 or 6 years of age. Nonsignificant trends at both ages-particularly the younger age-did favor the game activity, however. Recent studies have shown a surprising mnemonic competence of young children. Although the benefits of mnemonic strategies on recall
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have typically not been observed until about age 6, the activation of mnemonic strategies in response to the instruction “to remember” have been demonstrated at age 4 (Sodian, Schneider, & Perlmutter, 1986). Even toddlers as young as l&months-old have been observed to employ strategy-like behavior when instructed in a naturalistic setting to remember a toy’s location (DeLoache, Cassidy, & Brown, 1985). In summarizing these findings, Wellman (1988) has suggested that preschoolers be credited with having mnemonic strategies, yet viewed as such novices to the task of remembering that their strategies are more faulty than effective. The central purpose of this study was to investigate the specific conditions which promote mnemonically favorable activities in young children, and to assess how such conditions and activities affect retention. Whereas the Istomina work attemped to assess recall relative to the strictness or playfulness of the setting, her work was confounded not only methodologically but also conceptually, in that the different settings were assumed to have differential motivational effects on the children. By omitting the Soviet means-end concern, the current study focuses on the effects of environmental structure on recall through the establishment of five conditions providing graded contextual shifts from a strict laboratory environment to a free-play environment. One objective was to compare what children do with and how well they later remember materials which they have encountered in the course of play and in the course of a deliberate memory task. It was expected that the preschoolers would engage in different behaviors when asked to play as when asked to remember, and that children asked to play with toys would spontaneously activate more mnemonically useful behaviors and would thereby later remember more toys than children who were asked to remember the toys. Because children are accustomed to playing with toys, and not with pictures or other items, the prediction was limited to the condition which employed toys as stimulus materials. An additional aim of the investigation was to determine the role played by the materials in facilitating retention. In play or in recall preparation, children’s activities may vary as a function of the stimulus materials (Cole, Frankel, & Sharp, 1971). Because compatibility and familiarity facilitate deeper processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972), “toys” were expected to elicit more mnemonically useful activities, and hence greater retention, than “pictures of toys.” Finally, the setting in which instructions are given may affect recall performance. On the one hand, the typical laboratory setting (e.g., Moely et al., 1969), may be so unfamiliar that the young child’s performance is hampered. Soviet findings repeatedly point to lower recall levels in “academic” than in “play” conditions for preschoolers, despite the reversal of this trend over the elementary school years (Smirnov & Zin-
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chenko, 1969). The laboratory condition of the present study was viewed as an anchor both to the American experimental paradigm (e.g., Moely et al., 1969) and to the Soviet “lesson” format (Istomina, 1975), and was thereby predicted to yield the lowest level of recall of the five conditions. METHOD Design
Subjects in five different groups were asked to recall a list of 16 common items, the conditions and materials varying across the groups. These groups represented four “naturalistic” conditions, which form a 2 (pictures vs. toys) X 2 (“recall” vs. “play” instructions) factorial design, and a single “laboratory” condition, which can be considered an extra cell. Subjects
Seventy-four middle-class 4- and 5-year-old children (mean age = 57.6 months) from four preschools in the Chapel Hill and Durham, NC, area participated in the study. Because the Laboratory condition was conceptualized as an adjunctive condition, only 10 subjects were included here. There were 16 subjects in each of the remaining groups, approximately one-half of whom were male and one-half female. Children were assigned randomly to each of the five conditions, within the restriction of sample size for the Laboratory condition. Materials
and Apparatus
The to-be-remembered items were presented to the children either as pictures or as objects. The pictures were black-and-white line drawings on 3 x 5 in. cards, each containing a single item. The objects were miniature plastic, ceramic, or cloth toys. A white cloth, upon which was drawn a grid of 3 x 3 in. squares, was used to define the area on which the items were to remain throughout the session. To control for list-specific effects, two 16-item recall lists were constructed. Approximately one-half of the children in each group were assigned to each list. The items used in list I were: banana, grapes, lemon, pear; bowl, fork, plate, pot; elephant, lion, pig, zebra; coat, hat, shoe, shorts. The items for list II were: carrot, corn, peanut, pumpkin; bed, chest of drawers, lamp, sofa; helicopter, motorcycle, train, truck; bee, butterfly, ladybug, worm. These lists were well-known to the children who served as subjects. In pilot research, each list was correctly named by at least 80% of 15 children drawn from a similar sample as those in this experiment. Furthermore, 12 of 15 pilot children were able to sort the items into groups with two errors or less.
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Ail testing took place in the testing room of a mobile laboratory. The testing room, which contained a videotape camera, mounted on a tripod, and two audio microphones, was separated from an observation room by a one-way mirror. Procedure
Each subject was tested individually and received a single practice trial, two study periods, one recall test, and one final sorting test. The practice trial allowed the child to become acclimated to the general procedures of the experiment. The experimenter handed each of the six practice items to the child, asked the child to name the item and to place it on the white cloth. With the naming procedure complete, the experimenter gave the child one of two instructions. For the “recall” conditions, the experimenter asked the child “to move the items around any way you want to, to help you remember them. Do all the things you know of to try to remember these (pictures, toys).” For the “play” conditions, the experimenter said, “Do anything you would like with these (pictures, toys). You can play with them and move them around anywhere on this cloth.” For the practice trial, children were allowed 1 min to play with or to try to remember the items. If, during this study period, a child was distracted for 10 s or more, the experimenter repeated part of the instructions, saying. for example, “Are you trying to remember (playing with) these (pictures, toys)?” Otherwise, the experimenter avoided talking with the child, and gave brief responses to any questions. To prevent anticipation of recall by subjects receiving “play” instructions, no recall test was given with the practice trial. A similar procedure was employed for each of the two 2-min study periods. To avoid order-specific effects, half of the subjects received one order of presentation for the first study period, and a second order for the second study period, with the other half of the subjects receiving a reverse treatment. Following the second study period, the items were covered with a large cloth, and recall was requested. Subjects were asked, “Now tell me the names of all of those (pictures, toys) you’ve been (trying to remember, playing with).” To ensure that the children in the different groups had roughly similar knowledge of the categories used, the children were asked to categorically sort the items. To avoid interference with performance on other tasks, this sorting task was requested after the recall test was completed. For the sorting task, the examiner laid out four blank pieces of paper and asked the subjects to “put together the (pictures, toys) that are alike, that go together, that belong together.” When the subject picked up the first item, the experimenter cued, “What (pictures, toys) go with that?” After the sorting task, the child was praised for his or her overall performance, and thanked for participating in the study.
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The procedures for the Laboratory condition differed somewhat from that for the four “naturalistic” conditions. For the Laboratory condition, the testing room contained two chairs, one for the experimenter and one for the subject, and a table, across which the items were presented. Once the items were presented, the experimenter left the room; even if a child was distracted for 10 s or more, the experimenter remained out of the room, and made no attempt to refocus the child’s attenton on the task. In the “naturalistic” conditions, the experimenter and the subject sat on the floor, and the experimenter remained present for the study periods. Measures
Five different types of measures were obtained in order to assess each subject’s performance during the session. Three of these measures assessed performance during the study period, one during the recall task, and one during the final sorting task. For finegrained analyses of study period performance, “behavioral observations” focused on the child’s interactions with the stimuli, whereas “language observations” assessed the child’s vocalizations. A higher-order description of the child’s general “approach-to-task” examined the extent to which the instructions were followed, with particular interest in whether children asked “to remember” engaged in memory-appropriate behaviors and whether children asked “to play” engaged in playful behaviors. This analysis of the children’s approach-to-task was not analytically independent of the behavior and language analyses. However, the analyses differed in that the behavior and language analyses focused on brief events, whereas the approach-to-task analysis looked at the flow of behavior over a 15-s duration. Approach-to-task. In order to assess the children’s understanding of the instructions, videotape records were analyzed, with judgments made at each 15-s interval, according to the following 5-item scheme: A. Study: rehearsing, sorting, or otherwise attempting to remember the items. B. Investigate: looking at an item, usually while touching it, such as when exploring its characteristics. C. Functional play: moving an item or items around (e.g., collecting or banging the pictures), or engaging the properties of an item (e.g., rolling the truck, eating the banana, unbuttoning the coat). D. Free play: employing an item or items in unique ways. Here the child goes beyond the functional properties of the items (e.g., putting the shoe on the elephant, or having the ladybug ride the motorcycle). E. Distraction: not attending to the stimulus materials. In addition, certain segments could not be coded because of distortions or interference in the videotape records, These 15-s segments were classified as “poor video.”
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Behavioral observations. During the study periods, those behaviors which reflected the subject’s interactions with the stimulus materials were recorded and later verified from videotape records for 70 subjects. Using a behavior coding scale consisting of seven categories, judgments were made every 5 s of the study period. The behavioral categories were: A. No contact: not contacting any of the items, such as when distracted or in a natural pause in activity. B. Call: saying the name of an item without contacting it. C. Handle: contacting an item but not attending to its properties or functions, or contacting an item without looking at it (e.g., throwing, banging, or shuffling the items). D. Scan: contacting and looking at more than one item during a single 5-s block, but not attending to the items’ properties or functions. E. Focus: contacting and attending to the properties or functions of a single item for most of a 5-s block. F. Combine: contacting and attending to the properties or functions of two or more items for most of a 5-s block. G. Cluster: placing three or four items of a single conceptual category together. Language observations. Tape recordings of the study period were reviewed with each language event transcribed as verbatim as possible. These events were then categorized according to the following scheme: A. Irrelevant vocalization: discussing content irrelevant to the task. B. Nonlinguistic utterances: making noises appropriate to the activity (e.g., “whoosh” as the child spreads out the pictures). C. Naming: saying the name of an item (e.g., “truck” or “this is a truck”). Whereas calling, described above in the behavioral observations, occurs only when a child names an item without touching it, naming occurs whether or not the item is touched. D. Elaboration: talking about one item (e.g., “I’m squeezing the lemon) or talking about two items of different conceptual categories. E. Embedding: talking about an item as an examplar of a conceptual category (e.g., “the banana is a fruit”) or talking about a conceptual category (e.g., “now all the animals are in the pasture”). The remaining two measures assessed performance during the recall task and during the final sorting task. The recall protocols were scored for the number of items correctly recalled. Sorting protocols were measured using the Cohen, Sakoda, and Bousfield (1954) ratio of repetition (RR) index, a quantitative measure of categorization. Interobserver Reliability Interobserver reliability was calculated for the approach-to-task and study period behavior categories from the videotapes of both trials of 20 subjects. The videotapes were viewed independently by the experi-
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menter and an undergraduate assistant who also participated in the actual data collection. Interobserver reliability was assessed as the proportion of agreements divided by the sum of agreements and disagreements (i.e., A/A + D) where, for a given category, agreements represent the total frequency of similar judgments by the two judges and disagreements included the total frequency of dissimilar judgments. According to this method, reliability for the study period behavior categories was as follows: no contact (.89), calling (.96), handling (.92), scanning (.71), focusing (.91), combining (.81), and clustering (.72). Because scanning by definition occurred for a very brief duration, some disagreements are attributable to the recording of some scanning events in different 5-s blocks by the two observers. The lower reliability for grouping is related to the rarity of this event. Interobserver reliability for the approach-totask categories was: studying (.79), investigation (.80), functional play (.65). and free play (.85). The lower reliability for these categories relative to the study period behavior categories reflects the difficulty of making higher-order judgments of continuous behavior. RESULTS
An initial multivariate analysis of variance was conducted across each of the three sets of behavioral variables-the five approach-to-task variables, the seven study period behaviors, and the five study period language variables-for each of the principal hypotheses. Given significance for these multivariate clusters, univariate findings were then inspected. Because the multivariate analyses found no effects of list, order of presentation, or school which the child attended, the data were collapsed across these factors. Separate analyses revealed no main or interaction effects of gender and condition in the children’s approach-to-task or study period language behaviors. However, analysis of the study period behaviors did yield a significant interaction of gender with condition; these data were analyzed separately for girls and boys. In the presentation of findings, those effects which were tested but found to be nonsignificant are typically not listed. Approach-to-Task
Judgments for the approach-to-task were made every 15 s from videoand audio-recordings of the study period sessions. Across both trials, 16 judgments were made for each subject. If, during a given interval, the record was unclear, that interval was considered missing data, with a total of 10 subjects omitted. These behavior patterns were examined in the context of a between-groups analysis of variance with a special contrast of the three groups receiving instructions “to try to remember” (Laboratory, Pictures-Recall, and Toys-Recall) with the two groups re-
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TABLE 1 APPROACH-TO-TASKBEHAVIORSBY GROUP Group (n)
Study
Investigate
Functional play
Laboratory (IO) Pictures-Recall (16) Pictures-Play t 16) Toys-Recall (16) Toys-Play (16)
3.500 4.625 0.313 4.438 0.875
0.600 4.188 5.813 3.063 2.188
0.400 I .875 3.625 1.813 3.750
Note.
Free play Distraction 0.000 0.813 0.875 0.625 5.813
5.!200 2.500 2.313 3.063 I.688
Poor video 5.600 2.000 3.063 3.000 1.688
The values represent mean number of 15-s intervals of each approach-to-task
behavior.
ceiving instructions “to play” (Pictures-Play and Toys-Play). The error term was based on the 64 included subjects across the five groups. As seen in Table 1, those children given “recall” instructions studied the items significantly more than those given “play” instructions, F(1, 59) = 15.384, p < .OOl, but there was no effect of instructions on the amount of time spent investigating the properties of the items. However, the “play” groups were less distracted, F(1, 59) = 14.620, p < .OOl, and engaged in more functional play, F(1. 59) = 7.168, p < .OOl, and more free play, F(1, 59) = 14.885, p < .OOl, than did the “recall” groups. These differences indicate that the children responded appropriately to the instructions given, with those given “recall” instructions engaging in mnemonically appropriate behaviors, and those given “play” instructions engaging in playful behaviors. Study Period Activities
For the analysis of study period behaviors, the child’s continuous interaction with the stimulus materials was divided into 5-s intervals. These data represent the combined frequencies across the two study periods because preliminary analyses revealed that only one category of study period activities differed between the first and the second study period. The sole category that did differ across study periods was the children’s handling of the items, which was somewhat higher during the second than during the first study period, F(1, 69) = 4.26, p < .05. Table 2 displays the mean frequency of 5-s intervals in which female and male subjects in each condition engaged in the seven study period behaviors. The error terms for study period analyses were based on the variability across the 10 cells. Because videotape recordings were not available for all subjects, the error terms for these behavior analyses are based on 70 subjects, including 38 boys and 32 girls. The multivariate data for each gender were subjected to a betweengroups analysis of variance which included four special contrasts. One
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TABLE STUDY
PERIOD
2
BEHAVIORS
BY GROUP -____-.-
Group-gender
(n)
No contact
Call
Handle
Scan Focus Combine
Cluster ____.0.00 0.00 3.57 0.00 0.00 0.38 I.14 0.25 I .88 2.75
Laboratory-female (3) 25.33 16.00 2.33 3.00 1.33 0.00 Laboratory-male (7) 25. I7 2.17 I .83 10.83 7.67 0.00 Pictures-Recall-female (7) 8.57 0.71 3.71 14.29 16.43 0.57 Pictures-Recall-male (9) 12.75 0.38 13.62 9.25 10.88 0.62 Pictures-Play-female (7) 4.86 0.00 9.29 10.71 18.86 3.64 Pictures-Play-male (9) 7.50 0.00 10.12 7.12 21.62 1.00 Toys-Recall-female (8) 12.29 0.00 I .43 13.71 17.14 0.79 Toys-Recall-male (8) 9.50 7.38 1.50 4.62 21.88 3.00 Toys-Play-female (8) 4.50 0.00 0.12 3.88 30.00 7.56 Toys-Play-male (8) 2.25 0.00 0.38 5.38 23.75 12.94 -_____ ___________ Note. The values represent mean number of 5-s intervals of each study period behavior. Frequencies are based on the number of reliable videotape recordings per cell.
contrast compared the Laboratory condition with the four “naturalistic” conditions. The remaining contrasts examined differences among the four naturalistic conditions, comparing the main effects of intructions and of materials, and the interaction of the effects of instructions and materials. Multivariate analyses found that both boys, F(7, 27) = 5.457, p < .OOl, and girls, F(7, 21) = 16.017, p < .OOl, behaved differently in the laboratory than in the naturalistic conditions. Boys, F(1, 33) = 34.46, p < .OOl. and girls, F(I, 27) = 10.98, p < .Ol contacted the items less in the laboratory condition, and both boys, F(1, 33) = 5.95, p < .05, and girls, F(1, 27) = 12.50, p < .Ol focused more in the naturalistic conditions. Boys, F(1, 33) = 5.85, p < .05 combined items more in the naturalistic than in the laboratory condition. Girls, F(1, 27) = 90.30, p < .OOl called more in the laboratory than in the naturalistic conditions. Within the naturalistic conditions, multivariate contrasts revealed no interaction effects of instructions with materials for either gender. No significant multivariate effect of materials was found for girls. Boys, F(7. 27) = 7.21, p < .OOl, did interact with the two types of material differentially, however, both manipulating, F(l, 33) = 10.77, p < .Ol, and combining, F(l, 33) = 24.60, p < .Ol the toys more than the pictures. Multivariate contrasts of the naturalistic “recall” versus “play” conditions were significant for boys, F(7, 27) = 2.84, p < .05, and for girls, F(7, 21) = 3.70, p < .Ol. When asked to “play,” boys engaged in fewer periods of noncontact, F(1, 33) = 7.23. p < .Ol, less calling, F(1. 33) = 4.96, p < .05, and more combining than when asked to “recall.” Girls engaged in less scanning, F( 1, 27) = 4.30, p < .05, more focusing, F(l. 21) = 5.22, p < .05, and more combining, F(l, 21) = 7.95, p < .Ol, when asked to “play” than when asked to “recall.”
INTENTIONAL
AND UNINTENTIONAL TABLE
STUDY
Group (n) Laboratory (8) Pictures-Recall (14) Pictures-Play (15) Toys-Recall (14) Toys-Play (16)
Irrelevant vocalization 1.50 4.71 5.27 3.43 3.00
PERIOD
253
3
LANGUAGE
BY GROUP
Nonlinguistic utterance
Naming
0.00 0.71 0.00 0.07 1.62
MEMORY
19.12 16.21 1.20 23.57 2.00
Elaboration 0.00 0.14 1.00 0.88 5.88
Embedding 0.00 0.28 0.00 0.00 0.94
Note. The values represent mean frequencies for each group. Frequencies are based on the number of reliable audiotape recordings per cell.
Table 3 summarizes the verbal activities for subjects in each condition. Analyzed with the same contrasts as the behavioral data, the error term was based on 67 subjects only, with seven subjects omitted due to difficulties with the audiotape records but no gender effects. Note first that irrelevant vocalizations occurred at a similarly low frequency across the five conditions. Second, nonlinguistic utterances were rare; however. because these utterances occurred somewhat more frequently in the Toys-Play condition than in any other condition, an interaction of stimulus materials and instructions was obtained, F( 1, 62) = 4.3 11, p < .05. Third, naming was observed significantly more often in recall than in play conditions, F(1, 62) = 25.267, p < .OOl. Fourth, the high frequency of elaboration among Toys-Play subjects resulted in an interaction between materials and instructions, F(1, 62) = 4.913, p < .05. Finally, embedding was rare, and occurred only in the Pictures-Recall and the Toys-Play conditions. These study period data are directly relevant to the major hypotheses underlying this investigation. One of the special contrasts already described examined the main effect of stimulus materials on study period activities. Was the children’s language with pictures and toys markedly different? Yes. Children made more nonlinguistic utterances, F(1, 62) = 4.906, p < .05, as well as more elaborations, F(1, 62) = 9.886, p < .005, when playing with toys than with pictures. An additional pair of special contrasts was employed to test the other two predictions of this investigation. These contrasts compared, first, the Toys-Recall with the ToysPlay conditions, and, second, the Laboratory with the Pictures-Recall conditions. The children who were asked “to try to remember” a set of toys acted differently than those asked “to play with” a set of toys, with significant multivariate contrasts both for boys, F(7, 27) = 3.82, p < .Ol, and for girls, F(7, 21) = 3.17, p < .05. There was significantly more contact, F( 1, 33) = 4.87, p < .05, and more combining, F( 1, 33) = 23.72, p <
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.OOl, when boys were asked to play than when they were asked to remember toys. Girls focused, F(1, 27) = 7.64, p < .05, and combined, F( 1, 27) = 7.78, p < .Ol, more when asked to play than when asked to remember toys. Boys called, F( 1, 33) = 8.99, p < .Ol , and girls scanned, F(1,27) = 4.78, p < .05, more when asked to recall. Across both genders, children asked “to try to remember” the toys named them more than children asked “to play with” toys, F( I, 62) = 17.740, p < .OOl, but those asked “to play” engaged in more nonlinguistic utterances, F( 1, 62) = 8.003, p < .Ol, and more expansions, F(1, 62) = 14.512, p < .OOl. Multivariate analysis revealed no differential use of language under the Laboratory versus the Picture-Recall condition, and no distinctions among the study period behaviors of boys. Girls did behave differentially in the two conditions, F( 1, 21) = 11.26, p < .Ol. including more periods of no contact, F(1, 27) = 7.54, p < .05, more calling, F( I, 27) = 65.12, p < .OOl, and less focusing, F( 1, 27) = 5.93, p < .05 in the Laboratory than in the naturalistic Picture-Recall condition. Red1 Analysis of the recall data indicated no main effects of list, order of presentation, or school that the child attended. Item analyses revealed that, except for three toys, all 32 toys and 32 pictures were recalled at rates between .20 and .80. The toy motorcycle was recalled at a rate of .I7 and the toy pear and pig were recalled at .87. A mixed factorial analysis of the effects of the sex of the child and of condition yielded a main effect for the child’s gender, with girls recalling significantly more items than boys, F( 1, 64) = 4.571, p < .05; however, gender did not interact with conditions. The mean number of items recalled correctly by females and males was 7.97 and 6.58, respectively. The children recalled a mean of 7.50 items in the Laboratory condition, 5.69 in the Pictures-Recall condition, 6.06 in the Pictures-Play condition, 7.44 in the Toys-Recall condition, and 9.44 in the Toys-Play condition. The data were analyzed according to the contrasts employed in the treatment of the study period activities, with the error term based on the variability across the full pool of 74 subjects. As can be seen, recall varied considerably as a function of condition. First, the simple effect of the Toys-Recall and the Toys-Play conditions was significant, F( I, 64) = 4.62, p < .05. The main effect for instructions was in the expected direction, but, across conditions, was not significant. Second, children recalled significantly more items when toys were employed as the stimulus materials than when pictures were used, F(1. 64) = 14.51. p < .OOl. Third, within the naturalistic conditions, the interaction between instructions and materials was not significant. Fourth, recall for the Laboratory condition was not significantly different
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AND UNINTENTIONAL
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from that of the average of the four naturalistic conditions, nor from the most similar naturalistic condition (Pictures-Recall). Although in the predicted direction, recall for the Toys-Play condition was not significantly higher than that for the Laboratory group. Sorting Task
The sorting task, carried out at the end of the experimental sequence, assessed the children’s knowledge of the list categories. RR, the index of category clustering, has a range from 0.0 to 0.80, with increasing values indicative of greater clustering. Mean RR scores for the Laboratory, Pictures-Recall, Pictures-Play, Toys-Recall, and Toys-Play conditions were 55, .48, .44, .52, and .55, respectively. Because there were no significant differences across the conditions, it is reasonable to assume that differences obtained for the study period activities and for recall are not due to differences in underlying categorical knowledge. DISCUSSION
Instructions “to play with” toys promoted better retention than instructions “to remember” toys. This counter-intuitive effect means that asking a child “to remember” can lead to less recall than merely asking the child “to play.” Why? Inspection of the findings suggests that the effects were mediated by the organizations that children spontaneously imposed on the materials when merely asked to play. Compared to the “remember” groups, the “play” groups engaged in more “functional play,” such as eating the banana or unbuttoning the coat, and more “free play,” such as putting the shoe on the elephant or riding the ladybug on the motorcycle. With toys. the “play” instructions elicited more talking, play noise, physical contact, and examination of individual and small groups of toys than did the “remember” instructions. For instance, the children in the play conditions often narrated their activity, e.g., “I’m squeezing the lemon,” or “I’m putting the shorts with the helicopter,” and sometimes animated their activity with onomatopoeic imitations (e.g., “slurp” while their elephant drank and “bzzzz” while their bee was flying). In an even more complex sequence, one 5-yearold girl told a story about farm animals, and created a “farm scene” organization of the 16 toys, of which she later recalled 12. These qualitative findings confirm the observation of Schneider and Brun (1987) that “the majority of our children seemed to be more interested during the play than during the lesson activities.” The elevated recall found in the Toys-Play condition supports the assumption underlying Istomina’s work-despite its multiple flaws in execution-that certain play situations can be structured to promote greater retention than comparable academic situations. Although the children told “to remember” the toys appeared to interact
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less with the items, of particular importance is that these children consistently engaged in substantial rehearsal-measured in this study as calling and naming behaviors. A modal response to the “to remember” instructions was to name each item one at a time, sometimes repeating the process, primarily attending to a single item at a time. In contrast to Istomina’s contention that preschoolers essentially lack the capacity for voluntary memory, these findings support the more recent view that 4- to j-year-old children do produce mnemonically appropriate strategies when asked to remember (Weissberg & Paris, 1986). It is noteworthy that the effect of instructions was limited to the toy conditions. Across both instructional conditions, toys were recalled better than pictures, which highlights the powerful influence of the stimulus materials on recall performance. The children collected, spread, and shuffled the pictures, but used, combined, told stories about, and made noises with the miniature toys. This finding differs from that of Cole et al. (197 1), who reported no differences when comparing recall for photographs and for objects. An important distinction between the Cole et al. (1971) study and this investigation is that subjects in the Cole et al. (1971) study were allowed no opportunity to handle the items, but subjects in this investigation were encouraged to “move the items around.” It would appear then that 4- and j-year-old children’s level of retention increases when the handling of toy stimuli is a part of study period activities. The third prediction was that the Laboratory condition would yield less interaction with the stimulus materials and therefore less retention than the comparable Pictures-Recall condition. Indeed, the Laboratory condition did evoke less contact with the items. Yet, there was also significantly more rehearsal-with some children appearing to whisper to themselves while looking away from the pictures-and greater recall. The graded increases in depth of processing and consequent retention predicted to accompany the graded shifts from laboratory to free play conditions were not found. Children in the Laboratory condition, specifically, and the “recall” conditions in general were observed to engage in such strategic efforts as rehearsal, and thereby to obtain retention levels which, across all conditions, were not different from the “play” conditions. Although not promoting the rehearsal strategies seen in the “recall” conditions, the Toys-Play condition spontaneously elicited an alternative, apparently deeper, processing of the stimulus information, yielding a retention level higher than its companion condition, ToysRecall. That the toys were categorizable, familiar, and attractive apparently did trigger the children’s engagement, their involuntary memorization, and their subsequent retention. With regard to the “differentiation hypothesis” (Appel, Cooper, McCarrell, Sims-Knight, Yussen, & Flavell, 1972). the present study
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found that preschoolers given instructions “to remember” approached the stimulus items during the study periods in a substantially different manner than those children given “play” instructions. Consistent with recent evidence demonstrating that young children do distinguish between “perceiving” and “memorizing” (Galbraith, Olsen, Duerden, & Harris, 1982), these children’s differentiation of the instructions affected their behavior and language during the study period and their level of retention. A study which compares along a common baseline the ability of preschoolers to differentiate perception, memory, and play instructions is called for. Future research should continue the analysis of the relationship between study phase activities and performance on tests of retention, and attempt to map out the developmental course of intentional and unintentional memory processing. REFERENCES Appel, L. F., Cooper, B. G., McCarrell. N., Sims-Knight. J., Yussen, S., & Flavell, J. H. (1972). The development of the distinction between perceiving and memorizing. Child Del>elopment, 43, 1365- I38 I. Cohen, B. H., Sakoda. J. M., & Bousfield, J. H. (1954). The statistical unalysis of the incidence of clustering in the recall of randomly arranged associates. Technical Report No. IO, University of Connecticut, Contract Nonr 631 (OO), Office of Naval Research. Cole, M., Frankel, F., & Sharp, D. (1971). Development of free recall in children. Developmental
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Craik. F. 1. M.. & Lockhart, R.S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684. DeLoache, J. S., Cassidy. D. J., & Brown, A. L. (1985). Precursors of young mnemonic strategies in very young children’s memory. Child Development, 56, 125-137. Flavell, J., Beach, D.. & Chinsky, J. (1966). Spontaneous verbal rehearsal in a memory task as a function of age. Child Development, 37, 283-299. Galbraith. R. C., Olsen, S. F., Duerden, D. S., & Harris, W. L. (1982). The differentiation hypothesis: Distinguishing between perceiving and memorizing. American Journal of Psychology,
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Manuilenko, Z. V. (1975). The development of voluntary behavior in preschool-age children. Soviet Psychology, 13, 65-l 16. Moely, B. E., Olson, F. A., Halwes, T. G., & Flavell. J. H. (1969). Production deficiency in young children’s clustered recall. Developmental Psychology, 1, 26-34. Murphy, M. D., & Brown, A. L. (1975). Incidental learning in preschool children as a function of level of cognitive analysis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 19, 509-523. Ornstein, P. A., Naus, M. J., & Stone, B. P. (1977). Rehearsal training and developmental differences in memory. Developmentnl Psychology, 13, 15-24. Piaget, J.. & Inhelder, B. (1973). Memory and intelligence in children. London: Basic Books. Schneider, W., & Brun, H. (1987). The role of context in young children’s memory performance: Istomina revisited. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 333341.
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Smirnov, A. A., & Zinchenko, P. I. (1%9). Problems in the psychology of memory. In M. Cole & I. Maltzman (Eds.), A handbook of contemporary Soviet psychology. New York: Basic Books. Sodian, B., Schneider, W.. & Perlmutter, M. (1986). Recall, clustering, and metamemory in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 41, 395-410. Weissberg, J. A., & Paris, S. G. (1986). Young children’s remembering in different contexts: A replication and reinterpretation of Istomina’s study. Child Development, 57, 11231129. Wellman, H. M. (1988). The early development of memory strategies. In F. E. Weinart & M. Perlmutter (Eds.), Memor?, development: Universal changes and individual differences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Zaporozhets. A. V.. & Elkonin, D. B. (1971). The psychology of preschool children. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. RECEIVED:
March 31, 1988;
REVISED
March 21. 1990.