The effects of size and color cues on the delayed response of very young children

Abstract

Sixteen children each at 18, 24, 30, and 36 months of age participated in a four-choice delayed reaction task to assess memory for location of a hidden object. On one-third of the trials, only place cues were available; on another third, size cues were added; on the remaining third, color cues were added. All age groups benefited from added visual cues on the test trials, with size cues being particularly facilitating. At the end of the test trials, two additional trials were presented in which the size or color cues were surreptitiously switched so that they were no longer redundant with place cues. Only the oldest children were likely to respond directly to a visual cue when in conflict with place cues. The results support a developmental model suggesting a shift from reliance on place cues,to greater reliance on other associated visual cues, in memory for locating a hidden object.

The rise of the metamind

“…While autistic children show evidence for a collating mind, through, for example, mirror selfrecognition (Dawson and McKissick 1984) and pretend play (V. Lewis and Boucher 1988), there is a lack of evidence for metamind. Besides consistently failing classic theory-of-mind tasks (Baron-Cohen et al 1985;Leslie and Frith 1988;BaronCohen 1989;Perner et al 1989;Prior et al 1990), autistic children do not seem to develop autobiographic memory (Boucher and Warrington 1976;Boucher and Lewis 1989;Powell and Jordan 1993), have severe problems with mental disengagement and executive control (Ozonoff et al 1991;Hughes and Russell 1993;Hughes et al 1994), lack generativity in pretend play (Jarrold et al 1996), have problems imagining unreal things (Scott and Baron-Cohen 1996), have a gross language-acquisition deficit (Sigman and Ungerer 1984), are characteristically engaging in stereotyped and routinized actions rather than flexible planned behaviour (e.g.…”

“…The model's time-bridging capacity seems to be quite limited at first. Searching for an object hidden under one of two cloths deteriorates to chance level if the delay between witnessing the placement and starting the search is more than 8 s in tenmonth-olds (Diamond 1985), and more than only 20 s in 16-month-olds (Daechler et al 1976). This does not mean, however, that the infant does not store information and accumulate knowledge.…”

Memory in Very Young Children

“…In fact, such cues become the preferred criteria for finding an object when in conflict with spatial location (Daehler et al, 1976;Horn & Ratner, 1978). The following description given by Myers and Ratner (in press) summarizes the developmental differences quite succinctly: "For those under 2 the delayed response task seemed to translate to 'remember the object is in the box located there' and they relied heavily on location cues ....…”

“…These studies have typically used arrays of small containers with distinctive cues such as color and size (Daehler, Bukatko, Benson, & Myers, 1976), pictures that either match, are associatively related, or are unrelated to the target object (Perlmutter et aI., 1981;Ratner & Myers, 1980), or no cues other than location (Hom & Myers, 1978).…”

“…But children less than 3 years of age can enlist discriminative cues to aid search performance under some conditions. These include (1) distinctive cues which are an intrinsic part of the hiding location, such as the color or size of a container (Daehler, Bukatko, Benson, & Myers, 1976); (2) pictures associated with a hiding location that actually portray the target object to be retrieved (Ratner & Myers, 1980); and (3) natural or easily discriminated landmarks within the home and associated with hiding places that are otherwise not very distinctive (DeLoache & Brown, 1983). In contrast, pictures closely related to the target to be retrieved and arbitrary pictures linked to the location in which the object has been hidden, even when these discriminative pictures are singled out by verbal statements such as, "the cracker is with the ," have not been found to be consistently helpful to subjects at 2 years of age (Horn & Myers, 1978;Ratner & Myers, 1980; but see also Blair, Perlmutter, & Myers, 1978;and Perlmutter et aI., 1981 for evidence that 2-year-olds can use arbitary cues under some circumstances).…”