Effects of lower versus middle class parental occupation, verbal intelligence, and action content of pictured stimuli upon nonverbal serial recall were investigated in white first-graders attending a semi-rural elementary school in southeastern Michigan. Forty lower class and 20 middle class children, (half boys and half girls) were grouped on the basis of sex, social class membership and scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Children were given two trials and asked to recall a sequence of three color photographs out of six from each of four arrays following a 15-second delay between them during which photographs were reshuffled. Arrays consisted of (1) static objects (comb, zipper, glass of milk, guitar, steering wheel, hammer), (2) static objects-in-action (manipulated by hands ), (3) activities (push, pull, lift something , run, jump, hang on the bars), and (4) faces (angry, happy, scared, sad, sleepy, stubborn). Occupation-intelligence yielded no main effects. Recall was higher for pictured static objects than for actions, and for objects in action than for faces and activities. A class-intelligence interaction with action content supported the underlying cognitive-developmental theory, while suggesting that intelligence is a better predictor than occupation in a small integrated community. Assumptions about encoding processes were explored using children's verbal and action labeling plus verbal report. (Author/WY)