A set of studies investigated the relative importance of operative schemes and figurative (rote) memory. In Study I, 60 concrete operational children from grades 1-4 were asked to reconstruct two types of stimuli from memory. In order to separate the effects of operative and figurative skill use, learning disabled children with poor figurative memories were compared to children with normal memory skills. In one type of stimulus condition (an arbitrary color sequence) the elements of the display were presented in an unorganized manner so that operative schemes would be of relatively little use for memory. In a second type of stimulus condition, (a seriated array) elements were organized so that operative schemes would be highly relevant. As predicted, a significant Group X Stimulus interaction was found, with the learning disabled children performing comparably well to normal children on the seriated stimulus, but worse than the normal children on the arbitrary stimulus due to their deficient figurative memory skills. In Study II, 20 preschool children (mean age, 4 years, 6 months) classified as nonseriaters were given the same memory tasks to determine whether the tasks were equivalent figuratively for children lacking the relavent operative schemes. As predicted, there was no significant difference between performance in the two types of stimulus conditions. To determine whether preschoolers could understand the organized stimulus, 14 preschool children classified as seriaters were tested on the same tasks in a third study. Performance in the organized stimulus condition was significantly better than performance in the unorganized stimulus condition. These results lend support to Piagetian theory. (Author/SS)