The emergence of strategic verbal rehearsal at around 7 years of age is widely considered a major milestone in descriptions of the development of short-term memory across childhood. Likewise, rehearsal is believed by many to be a crucial factor in explaining why memory improves with age. This apparent qualitative shift in mnemonic processes has…

Knowledge of sequential relationships enables future events to be anticipated and processed efficiently. Research with the serial reaction time task (SRTT) has shown that sequence learning often occurs implicitly without effort or awareness. Here, the authors report 4 experiments that use a triplet-learning task (TLT) to investigate sequence…

Kindergarten, second-grade, fifth-grade, and college subjects were tested in a serial-position recall task under each of four conditions: Visual stimuli/visual recall cue, visual stimuli/auditory recall cue, auditory stimuli/visual recall cue, auditory stimuli/auditory recall cue. Visual stimuli were pictures of common animals and objects;…