Seeing, Hearing and Doing: A Developmental Study of Memory for Actions.

This study examining children's ability to organize information for the purpose of recall was designed to control for verbal ability differences. The participants were 10 boys and 10 girls each from kindergarten, 2nd, 4th and 6th grades. A modified "Simon Says" game was used to enable the children to respond to eight selected verbal and motor commands with an appropriate motor act. The experimenter first read or demonstrated each of the eight commands in a random order and, after all the commands had been presented, asked the child to execute as many of the commands as he could. Each child received 20 presentations of the eight commands. Results revealed recall effects typically observed in studies on memory development in which words were used as stimuli or responses. These included: (1) serial position effects, with younger children showing more recency and older children more primacy effects, and (2) better recall by older children. However, since the younger children structured their responses in recall as well, and in the same way as older children, the developmental differences in amount recalled would not seem to depend on response organization. (JMB)