Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to carry out intended actions in the future (e.g., posting a letter on the way to school or passing on a message) and is important for children's independent functioning in daily life. This study examined, for the first time, the effects of incidental reminder cues on children's PM. Five- and 7-year-old…

Young children have informal knowledge of fractions before learning about fraction symbols in school. In the current study, we followed 103 children in the Mid-Atlantic United States from the fall to the spring of first grade to characterize the development of individual differences in early informal fraction knowledge, as well as its relation to…

The ability to bind, or link, different aspects of an experience in memory undergoes protracted development across childhood. Most studies of memory binding development have assessed extraobject binding between an object and some external element such as another object, whereas little work has examined the development of intraobject binding, such…

In this study, we investigate the development of primary memory capacity among children. Children between the ages of 5 and 8 completed 3 novel tasks (split span, interleaved lists, and a modified free-recall task) that measured primary memory by estimating the number of items in the focus of attention that could be spontaneously recalled in…

Children growing up in poverty have a higher likelihood of exposure to multiple forms of adversity that jeopardize their chances of academic success. The current paper identifies school mobility, or changing schools, as 1 such poverty-related risk. Using a sample of low-income, predominantly ethnic-minority children (n = 381) in Chicago, this…

Task prioritization can lead to trade-off patterns in dual-task situations. The authors compared dual-task performances in 9- and 11-year-old children and young adults performing a cognitive task and a motor task concurrently. The motor task required balancing on an ankle-disc board. Two cognitive tasks measured working memory and episodic memory…

Investigates the extent to which the high levels of recall and organization observed when children are asked to recall classmates' names (class recall) can be attributed to organizational versus item-specific effects. (Author/NH)

Kindergarten and first-grade children were told stories about twins who were given recognition and recall tasks and were asked to judge which twin remembered more of identical sets of items. Results showed that a number of the children gave clear evidence that they believed recognition tasks to be easier than recall tasks. (JMB)

Second and sixth grade children's relative sensitivity to acoustic, semantic, and physical dimensions was inferred from the amount of release from proactive interference obtained for shifts along each dimension. (ED)

Kindergarten and third grade subjects were timed while they verified sentences that paired animal names and properties varying in saliency and type of meaning. Results showed kindergarteners to be as adept as third graders in retrieving functional meaning that was highly salient and dynamic. (Author/JMB)

Examined elementary school children's memories for faces of preschool classmates after a three-year interval. Found that children recognized their classmates at an above-chance level but significantly below that of the preschool teachers. The classmate advantage on the face-matching task decreased across the three-year interval. Findings suggest…

A test of recognition memory for sentences was administered to 22 poor readers and 15 good readers ages 10.5 to 14.6 years. Poor readers were markedly retarded in aspects of the graphemic analysis (pattern-analyzing) of the texts. (LLK)

Research reports have indicated that children's memories for pictures or events improved between early and later recall sessions in conjunction with operative growth. This study attempted to determine (1) if any intervening operative training task would increase memory improvements, and (2) if exposure to the memory stimulus per se would enhance…

Second and fourth graders studied a 40-word list under various task conditions designed to induce differential depth of encoding of the individual items. In a subsequent free- recall task, the depth of encoding manipulation affected the fourth graders' performance more than the second graders' performance. (JMB)