The Encoding of Pictorial Information in Children and Adults

Abstract

Age and instructional differences in the representation of pictorial information were investigated in a recognition memory task. Nursery school and college‐age subjects observed pictures under name labeling, color labeling, imaging, and no label instructions. Subjects were then tested for retention of object identity and color information. In general, no label instructions led to poorer performance than any other condition; the three remaining groups, given an instruction requiring a discriminative response to each picture as it was shown, performed equally well. Significant age differences were found in memory for both object identity and color information; however, nursery school and college‐age subjects showed similar relative performance when tested for these two kinds of information, and most subjects at each age level showed superior retention of object identity over color information. These results suggest some limitation on the generality of claims that young children are more oriented to color information than are adults and, more importantly, that children represent their experience ikonically while adults tend to use a symbolic mode of representation.