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Differences in the search rate of children and adults in short-term memory

1977; Elsevier BV; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/0022-0965(77)90081-9

1096-0457

Douglas J. Herrmann, Toby Y. Landis,

Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies

When people recognize a test item as belonging or not belonging to a previously presented set, recognition latency increases with the number of items in the set. Although some evidence suggests otherwise, it is currently held that the rate of this increase is the same for children and adults. In contrast, the present experiments indicated a much slower search rate for second graders (mean age = 7.33 years) than for seventh (mean age = 12.50 years) and twelfth graders (mean age = 17.25 years). Moreover, search rate for second graders was invariant under instructions which did or did not emphasize speed and with presentation of the memory set in either the auditory or visual modality. Experiment II showed that the slow search rate for children was not due to differences in encoding between children and adults.