Naturalistic studies of memory for object location in very young children

Abstract

This chapter describes research on very young children's memory for location that was aimed at accurately assessing the memorial competence of young children.

A primer of research on cognitive strategy instruction: The important issues and how to address them

“…For some very simple tasks (e.g., remembering where a toy is hidden in a living room), children as young as 2 years of age display strategic behaviors (e.g., continuing to look at a hiding place from the time an object is obscured until it can be retrieved; DeLoache et al, 1985). In fact, identification of strategies used by preschoolers was a prominent part of cognitive developmental research during the 1980s (e.g., Beal and Fleisig, 1987;DeLoache, 1980;Schneider and Sodian, 1988;Sophian, 1984).…”

Memory in Very Young Children

“…Very young children can be introduced to the task with a minimum of instructions or pretraining. They seem to enjoy looking for things as long as the delay interval is not excessive (DeLoache, 1980;Diamond, 1983). Perhaps the biggest drawback with this procedure is that only a limited number of trials can be given within a conventional testing session, at least when longer delays are involved.…”

“…The primary dependent measure in these studies has been percent 'errorless retrieval, that is, the percentage of trials on which the child searches first at the correct location. Modifications of this basic procedure have included varying the delay intervening between hiding and searching from seconds or minutes to hours or even longer (DeLoache, 1980), pretraining the hide-and-seek game (DeLoache, 1984), instructing subjects to explicitly remember the location of the object DeLoache, 1984), having subjects exhaustively consider all hiding locations before initiating search (Perlmutter, Hazen, Mitchell, Grady, Cavenaugh, & Flook, 1981), using a familiar home or nursery school environment rather than an unfamiliar laboratory setting (DeLoache, 1980(DeLoache, , 1984Wellman, Somerville, & Haake, 1979), and hiding several objects in multiple locations (DeLoache, 1980).…”

Memory development between 2 and 20

“…In part this is because the early American work (e.g., Keeney et al, 1967;Hagen & Kingsley, 1968) and Soviet research (e.g., Yendovitskaya, 1971) provided little evidence that intentional, strategic memorizing occurred before six years of age. In fact, it is fairly easy to produce data consistent with this conclusion by using tbe "modal memory" study model (Brown & DeLoache, 1978;DeLoache, 1980). That approach involves presenting a sample of very young children with a memory task that is composed of unfamiliar materials that are presented in an unfamiliar context.…”

“…lt is very hard to carry out studies with children two to five years of age compared to older subjects. lt is both difficult to get children to understand what you want them to do and it is difficult to get them to do it (DeLoache, 1980). These difficulties make obvious that standard techniques for analyzing the memory 3.…”