Two groups of children, a 4-year old and a 5-year old group, were run in a short-term memory experiment specifically designed to sustain the attention of a young child. The results indicated that the technique was successful in permitting the collection of orderly data from these Ss. ProblemIn recent years there has been an increasing interest in the study of short-term memory (STM) as a fundamental problem in verbal learning (e. g., Melton, 1963;Peterson, 1963). Since most of the STM studies have used adult Ss, it seems desirable to extend the range of research to include data on young children. However, the tedious and uninteresting nature of the typical STM task would make it difficult to sustain the attention of a young child. The experiment described in this paper introduces a more appropriate technique which is based on a children's game, and which makes possible the collection of meaningful STM data from young chiidren. MethodForty children served as Ss in the experiment, all attendees at a child day care center in Oakland, California. There were two experimental groups of 20 Ss each; the groups were specified in terms of age. For Group I, the Ss were 31/2 to 4 1/2 years old (mean age 4.16, SD = .46); for Group II, the age range was 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 years (mean age 5.09, SD = .41). Each group contained ten boys and ten girls.The material to be remembered consisted of a set of eleven animal cards; i. e., playing cards containing pictures of familiar animals. On each trial, a subset of eight cards was randomly selected, and these were shown one at a time to S. After each card was shown to S, it was placed face down on the table so that after all eight cards were presented, they formed a horizontal row in front of S. After the last card was laid down, a cue card identical to one of the cards presented on that tri~l was placed face up on the table, and S was asked to turn up the card which he thought matched the cue card. When incorrect, S continued to turn up cards until he located the correct one.Each S was run for 32 trials, and each of the eight presentation positions contained the correct response (Le., the cue card) four times in the session. The assignment of pictures to serial positions was randomly determined for each trial. First and second choice responses were recorded, as was the latency from presentation of the cue card to the touching of the card chosen for the first choice response. ResultsFigure 1 presents the proportion of correct responses at each position for the two groups of Ss. Position 1 corresponds to the most recently displayed card, and position 8 to the first card shown on a trial. As expected, the proportion of correct responses at a given position is a decreasing function of the number of items intervening between presentation of the item and its test for recall. Note, also, that there isno evidence of a primacy effect in these data; i.e., positions 7 and 8 do not have a higher probability of correct recall than say positions 5 and 6. In similar experiments with college stu...