The development of memory: knowing, knowing about knowing, and knowing how to know.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: KNOWING, KNOWING ABOUT KNOWING; AND KNOWING HOW TO KNOW'

Ann L . Brown UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

I. INTRODUCTION. .......................................... A. BACKGROUND: WHAT IS MEMORY?. .................... B. ORGANIZATIONAL SCHEME ............................ 11.

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A TAXONOMY OF MEMORY TASKS AND PROCESSES . . . . . . . A. DELIBERATE vs. INVOLUNTARY REMEMBERING . . . . . . . . . B. MEMORY AS A MEANS OR AN END ..................... C. REPRODUCTIVE vs. RECONSTRUCTIVE PROCESSES . . . . . . . D. COMPREHENSION, RETENTION, AND INTENTION . . . . . . . . E. EPISODIC AND SEMANTIC MEMORY ....................

111. AN OVERVIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENTAL LITERATURE.

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A. DELIBERATE SKILLS FOR REMEMBERING ............... B. INVOLUNTARY FORMS OF REMEMBERING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C. DELIBERATE vs. INVOLUNTARY MEMORY: CONFLICT OR COMPLEMENT .........................................

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V.

A MODEL OF DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES IN MEMORY..

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A.INTRODUCTION ........................................ B.TERMINOLOGY ........................................ C.THEMODEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . D. THE UTILITY OF THE MODEL ...........................

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REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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SUMMARY

'This research was supported by Grants HD 06864 and HD 0595 1 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The author would like to express her appreciation to Joseph C. Campione and Martin D. Murphy for their continued advice and support and careful reading of the manuscript. Special thanks are also expressed to John H. Flavell, Scott G. Paris, and Hayne W. Reese for their invaluable comments on an earlier version of this paper. 103

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I. Introduction A. BACKGROUND: WHATIS MEMORY? An adequate definition of the term memory is a logical prerequisite for the task of tracing the ontogenesis of memorial processes.2 The problem of defining memory, however, has an honorable history considerably predating the inception of psychology as a science. It can be considered part of the more general question of the separability/inseparability of all the higher mental processes. William James (1890) believed that there is nothing unique about what we call memory, no special “faculty” involved and nothing to distinguish it from perception, imagination, or reasoning except the belief that we are reconstructing the past. The fundamental inseparability of memory from other higher mental processes has been periodically endorsed (Bartlett, 1932; Gomulicki, 1956) and is being reaffirmed today (Brewer, 1974a; Jenkins, 1973; Neisser, 1967; Norman, 1973; Piaget & Inhelder, 1973). For example, Bartlett’s view that it is impossible to understand any higher level mental process if it is simply studied “by and for itself” (Bartlett, 1932) is restated for present day psychology by Reitman (1970) “memory behavior does not depend solely upon a memory subsystem, it reflects the activity of the human cognitive system as a whole [p. 49oj ,” Jenkins (1973) contended that psychologists have avoided this issue, at least in part because such a view is “unsettling” or even “threatening,” for it appears to demand a concurrent understanding and consideration of all the higher mental processes. For the developmental psychologist, such a view would inevitably mean that it is impossible to understand memory development in isolation from cognitive development in general. According to this position, attempts to study the development of memory without reference to the development of perception, comprehension, inference, language, problem solving skills, etc., would be.of limited value at best, but to study such processes concurrently would seem to be an impossible task. Jenkins ( 1973) answered this conundrum by suggesting a “contextualist” approach to the study of the higher mental processes, whereby specific tasks are selected for study within a broad context because of their ecological validity or relevance to problems of everyday life. Such a view places heavy emphasis on defining the problem of interest, on selecting and formulating the questions carefully. It also demands that the particular type of memory be defined, thus, leading back to the *Although this paper bears the title of the development of memory, it should be pointed out that only a limited developmental spectrum will be considered, i.e., from approximately 3 years to maturity. No attempt to deal with memory in the infant (Cohen IQ Gelber, in press) or in the aged will be made. This limited spectrum, while reflecting the current state of developmental psychology, is to be regretted.

The Development of Memory

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central question: What is memory? Although no attempt will be made to answer the question in this paper, it will be argued that keeping such a question continually active will greatly affect the type of studies undertaken and the problems admitted to the domain of the developmental psychologist. Three forms of knowledge which have been studied under the general rubric of “memory phenomena” and which have been studied developmentally will be considered in this paper. The first is referred to in the title as “knowing.” Under this heading, an attempt will be made to deal with the development of the dynamic knowledge system, semantic memory, which underlies all cognitive activity. The problem of the inseparability of memory in this sense from intelligence in general will be considered. The second form of knowledge, “knowing about knowing,” refers to metamemorial processes (Flavell, 1971) or our introspective knowledge of the functioning of our own memory systems. The final type of knowledge to be considered, “knowing how to know,” refers to the repertoire of strategies and skills we possess for deliberate memorization activities. A major contention in this paper is that all three forms of memorial knowledge undergo qualitative changes in the course of human development, and the nature and extent of developmentally related differences will be determined by the extent to which any specific task or situation is dependent on any or all of these major knowledge systems.

B . ORGANIZATIONAL SCHEME First a basic taxonomy of memory processes will be given in order to provide a consistent terminology for use throughout the paper. This will be followed by a selected overview of the developmental literature. It should be noted that this paper is intended as a complement to previous reviews of the development of strategic skills (A. L. Brown, 1974, Flavell, 1970; Meacham, 1972) and metamemorial processes (Kreutzer, Leonard, & Flavell, in press) and, therefore the prime focus of attention in the literature review will be on semantic memory, an area which has received comparatively little attention. Following the review, a basic model for predicting the extent and nature of developmental changes will be presented. Finally, the implications of this model for future research will be examined.

11.

A Taxonomy of Memory Tasks and Processes

In order to describe developmental processes affecting memory, we need a clear statement of the various types of memory and the various types of processes. In this section an attempt will be made to provide some distinctions. These distinctions often take the form of dichotomies which by their nature lead to an

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oversimplification of a complex problem. However, it is accepted that these distinctions are artificial and oversimplified; they are introduced merely to provide a structure or framework within which to discuss developmental changes in memory.

A. DELIBERATE VS. INVOLUNTARY REMEMBERING The first basic distinction is between memory which is the product of deliberate attempts to remember and memory or knowledge which is the incidental result of interaction with a relatively meaningful environment. Developmental psychologists have concentrated almost exclusively on the child’s performance in laboratory or school situations where he is instructed to memorize deliberately with the goal of subsequent reproduction. In order to deal effectively with such situations, the mature memorizer adopts strategies or skills which increasingly involve attempts to render the material more meaningful, thus manageable. This is not the only form of memory, however, for a large part of what we remember or know was acquired, not through deliberate attempts at remembering, but as the involuntary result of our intelligent interaction with a meaningful environment. The very fact that we comprehend meaning and relations enables us to reconstruct meaning and relations at a later date.

B. MEMORYAS A MEANSOR AN END Soviet psychologists (Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969; Yendovitskaya, 1971) have distinguished between memory as a goal in itself and memory subordinated to the fulfillment of a meaninful activity. Remembering, even deliberately, in the context of an ongoing activity, is a less demanding situation for the young child. Indeed, it is in the context of meaningful activities that deliberate attempts to remember first emerge (Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969). Conversely, situations which demand exact reproduction of information as a goal in itself are, to some extent, artificial situations. The mature information processor has learned to recognize these atypical situations and to appreciate that in order to meet their demand characteristics, he must employ mnemonic skills of one form or another. Understanding the essential features of the material will not suffice, so deliberate attempts to memorize must be initiated. Such deliberate memorization skills, however, are not necessary when the task is to reconstruct the plot of an interesting novel or play, or, indeed, the gist of any meaningful series of events. Distinguishing between situations which demand deliberate memorization skills and situations where memory will be more or less automatic is a particularly difficult task for the young child (Yendovitskaya, 1971). Similarly, spontaneous initiation of deliberate tactics of memorization, as a goal in itself, is atypical of the developmentally young.


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C. REPRODUCTIVE VS. RECONSTRUCTIVE PROCESSES Key words in the preceding sections are reproduction and reconstruction, for these are fundamentally different types of regeneration. The child in the laboratory, under instruction to memorize deliberately, is often required to reproduce the to-be-remembered material, i.e., to provide an exact copy. Similarly the child in school is faced routinely with the task of reproducing, verbatim, material which is relatively meaningless to him. In contrast, memory which is the spontaneous result of intelligent activity is rarely an exact reproduction of the past experience but an imaginative recanstruction of the ideas (Bartlett, 1932; Binet & Henri, 1894), the meaning (Brewer, 1974b), or the gist (Fillenbaum, 1966) of the original input. We can reconstruct ideas and meaningful situations we have experienced in the past because they were meaningful and thus became part of our knowledge system. We readily regenerate the meaning even though the actual input from which we abstracted that meaning cannot always be reproduced.

D.

COMPREHENSION, RETENTION,AND INTENTION

Although a central theme of this paper is the intimate relationship between comprehension and retention of meaningful events, the terms should not be regarded as synonymous. Confusion has arisen due to the widespread use of comprehension tests to measure memory and memory tests to measure comprehension. Indeed, when an immediate appraisal is made of information gleaned from an event, comprehension and memory are inseparably linked. The same problem exists when attempting to separate the terms learning and memory. Although there may be distinct differences between the comprehension and retention of linguistic materials (Carroll, 1972; Fillenbaum, 1970; Scriven, 1972), these distinctions will not be addressed in this paper. Separation of comprehension and memory will be made only in t e n s of the temporal constraints on memory, for it is clear that we forget what we once understood. Furthermore, the passage of time affects the balance between the contribution of a weakening memory of an event and the active constructive processes used to reconstruct the experience (Neisser, 1967; Sulin & Dooling, 1974). Therefore, whereas comprehending or processing material at a deep semantic level (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) will lead to retention of the essential ideas without a deliberate attempt to remember, regeneration of that information at a subsequent date often depends on adequate retrieval operations or a favorable environmental reinstatement. Even the most meaningful events can become inaccessible after time. Thus, for brevity, reference is made to memory as the automatic or involuntary product of comprehension. This does not mean, however, that events are never forgotten, only that with an optimal retrieval environment the essential substance

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may be reconstructed even when no conscious attempts to remember had been evoked initially. One can deliberately attempt to retrieve information that was never consciously stored. The words involuntary and automatic are used throughout to refer to memory for meaningful events in the absence of a positive intent to remember. This is not intended to exclude the possibility that conscious, planful strategies may be involved in the comprehension and retention of meaningful events, only that the essential ideas can be retained in the absence of such deliberate acts. Strategies may enhance comprehension and retention of meaning but they are not an essential prerequisite for these processes to occur. Furthermore, comprehension should not be regarded as all or none, but as a process that can occur at different depths or levels depending on task demands. The depth of comprehension can range from a mere “awareness of the potential for interpretation” (Deese, 1969) to a full interpretation involving consideration of ambiguities, inferential steps, nuances of meaning, etc. (Mistler-Lachman, 1972). It seems reasonable to posit depth of comprehension as a prime cause of the richness of subsequent retention (Craik & Lockhart, 1972). Depth of Comprehension need not be the result of a deliberate intent to understand and remember, although such an intent might be expected to enhance performance. One largely ignored determinant of deep comprehension, which does not rely on deliberate intent, is the interest level or payoff value of the subject matter. Events that attract our interest will result in deeper levels of analysis. It is perfectly possible to comprehend a routine political speech, but to fail either to notice subtleties or to retain the message for long periods. By contrast, if the speech contains information of vital consequence to our lives, not only will nuances of meaning, whether real or imaginary, be perceived, but the essential message will be retained for long periods, perhaps indefinitely.

A. EPISODIC AND SEMANTIC MEMORY The final distinction which recurs throughout the paper is that between episodic and semantic memory (Tulving, 1972), a distinction which is roughly equivalent to Piaget’s separation of memory in the strict sense and memory in the broad sense (Piaget & Inhelder, 1973). Briefly, episodic memory is concerned with storage and retrieval of temporally dated, spatially located, and personally experienced events or episodes. A copy of events is required, i.e., reproductive memory of actually experienced but not necessarily meaningful events, such as whether a word occurred in an experimental list, its position in the list, the exact spelling of the word, etc. Similarly, for Piaget, memory in the strict sense is concerned with personally experienced events, localized in the past, involving single objects or instances, not necessarily meaningful or generalizable. In order to regenerate episodic information accurately the child must engage in intelligent retrieval strategies. If warned that such information will be required, he will benefit from intelligent use of acquisition strategies.


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Semantic memory, in contrast, is independent of specific episodic information. It is the system concerned with storage and utilization of knowledge or meaning about words, concepts, etc. Whereas episodic information refers to when, where, and how an item occurred, semantic information about an event is independent of that event’s actual Occurrence in a particular situation or its temporal co-occurrence with other events. Similarly, Piaget talks of memory in the wider sense, which involves the conservation of logical schemata or rules, by reason of their inherent logic or meaning. It refers to a “mode of knowledge” not bound up with specific data. Semantic memory is the organized knowledge a person possesses about words, meanings, relations, concepts, symbols, rules, etc. Inputs into the semantic memory system are referred to and absorbed within preexisting cognitive struct~res.~ If memory in this wider sense involves an “imaginative reconstruction or construction” built on extant knowledge rather than the “re-excitation of fixed lifeless fragmentary traces” (Bartlett, 1932), then the developmental level of the child will have a profound influence on his memory processes. There is obviously an interdependence between what a child can understand and do and what he can reconstruct. Thus, we would expect “the qualitative content of memory to be transformed with age” and experience as the child’s “interest in and general understanding of his world changes [Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 3791 .” In summary, the memorial processes of the developing child would be expected to undergo changes of two fundamental kinds. Gradually, as the child matures, his repertoire of specific skills for coping with episodic, reproductive memory demands expands. Maturation would also result in gradual changes and modification of his knowledge system or semantic memory, changes which would profoundly affect his reconstructions, “for the memory code itself depends on the subject’s operations and, therefore, this code is modified during development and depends at any given moment on the subject’s operational level [Piaget, 1968, p. 3.”

30ne glaring omission from this paper is any mention of developmental changes in the mode (Bruner, Greenfield, & Olver, 1966; Piaget & Inhelder, 1973) or organization (J. R. Anderson & Bower, 1973; Collins & Quillian, 1972; Loftus, 1973) of semantic memory. This question is of obvious importance for developmental psychologists, for it is essential that at least the organizational structure, if not the mode of representation, be understood before it is possible to tailor material to be congruent with the analyzing shuctures of the child. Influenced by current controversies surrounding the topics of language and thought, imagery and memory, and comprehension and meaning (Atteneave, 1974;Bransford& McCarrell, 1974; Brewer, IY74b). theauthorhasbeenpurposely neutral as to what the nature of the internal representation is. Rather what is “in the head” has been considered as “non-linguistic, imageless thought,” equivalent to Miller, Galanter, and Pribham (1960) concept of the Image, “The image is all the accumulated, organized knowledge that the organism has about itself and its world.” The issue of the form of mental representation was avoided in this paper.

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111. An Overview of the Developmental Literature A. DELIBERATE SKILLS FOR REMEMBERING 1. Memorial Strategies and Plans: Knowing How to Know Mnemonic strategies can be broadly defined as courses of action which are deliberately instigated for the purpose of remembering. By means of various mnemonic schemes, material is organized, transformed, or maintained at a given level of processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) in such a way that a more efficient use of a limited capacity memory system is ensured. Thus, the main feature of a mnemonic strategy is that it is not essential for task performance but is a voluntary plan adopted by subjects for cognitive economy, a plan which is subordinated to the goal of remembering (Meacham, 1972). Developmental psychologists have focused on the development of strategies of deliberate remembering to the virtual exclusion of other forms of memory. The simplest statement is one made by Flavell(1970), that if a mnemonic strategy is required for efficient performance on a task, developmental differences will be obtained. A. L. Brown (1973a, 1974) added the corollary that when no such strategy is required, the task will be relatively insensitive to developmental trends. Prior reviews of the literature have amply documented that the deliberate control of what to remember and what to forget, together with the strategic use of various tactics to aid these processes, is inadequate in the developmentally young (Brown, 1974; Flavell, 1970; Meacham, 1972); therefore, a further detailed review of this large and expanding literature will not be included here. In summary, there seems a general consensus that the degree to which a deliberate mnemonic strategy is required will determine the extent to which developmentally related differences in performance will occur. Thus, the use of cumulative rehearsal (Belmont & Butterfield, 1971; A. L. Brown, Campione, Bray, & Wilcox, 1973; Flavell, 1970), organizational (Tenney, 1973), and elaborative (A. L. Brown, 1973b; Reese, 1972; Rohwer, 1973) strategies, and the intentional nonprocessing of irrelevant material (Bray, 1973; Hagen, 1972) are all strategic behaviors under the control of the subject. As the child matures, he gradually acquires a basic repertoire of these skills, first as isolated taskdependent actions, but gradually these evolve into flexible, generalizableskills (A. L. Brown, 1974; Meacham, 1972; Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969). With extensive use, strategic intervention may become so dominant that it takes on many of the characteristics of automatic and unconscious processing, in that only intensive introspective questioning can reveal the operations of the strategic device even to the operator. Not only are strategies for acquisition of information inadequate in the developmentally young but so also are retrieval strategies (for an excellent review of retrieval strategies, see Kreutzer et a l . , in press). Thus, developmental dif-


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ferences would be expected to the extent that any task demands either acquisition or retrieval strategies, or both. Piaget (1968) has proposed a developmental progression in memorial efficiency depending on the extent to which stimulus support is provided in the memory probe. The progression is from recognition, through reconstruction, to evocation (recall). Recognition memory can depend only on sensorimotor schemata and does not necessarily demand that an internal representation be constructed. It is a primitive process which occurs in the presence of the object and “consists of perceiving the latter as something known.’’ Reconstruction is a form of recall but occurs earlier in the developmental sequence because it involves recall by “actions instead of images. Whereas reconstruction restores “the supposed genetic order of the formation of memories (actions +schemata +memory images), simple recall reverses the order by starting from the images [Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 3911.” Thus, recall is the most difficult process, as it demands regeneration in the absence of the stimulus, whereas reconstruction and recognition take place in the presence of the actual stimulus or its disarranged elements. Little attention has been paid to either the use of retrieval cues in general or reconstructive memory processes in children. However, one would predict developmental differences to the extent that any one task demands active retrieval strategies (Kobasigawa, 1974; Ritter, Kaprove, Pitch, & Flavell, 1973) and as a function of the degree of stimulus support provided in the memory probe (Blackstock & King, 1973; A. L. Brown, 1975b; K. E. Nelson, 1971). Under instructions to remember, the mature memorizer employs a variety of acquisition and retrieval strategies which are not available to the developmentally less mature individual. There is also an implicit assumption that there exists a hierarchy of strategies from simple processes like labeling and rote rehearsal, to elaborate attempts to extract or impose meaning and organization on the to-beremembered material. Indeed, as Reitman (1970) has pointed out, the outstanding feature of the mature memorizer is the amazing array of complex transformations he will bring to even the simplest laboratory task. Thus, the extent of developmental differences will be determined by the degree to which increasingly complex strategic skills can be applied. Finally, whereas it may be possible to distinguish certain basic skills the child must acquire, once he has mastered these it is no longer possible to define an optimal task strategy, for the optimal strategy for any one subject will depend on his success or failure with previous strategies, his estimation of his own capabilities, his creativity, certain personality variables, in fact, his personal cognitive style. ”

2 . Metamemorial Knowledge and Plans: Knowing About Knowing Although considerable attention has been paid to the ontogenesis of deliberate means of remembering, it is only recently that the intention to be strategic (A. L. Brown, 1974) or the plan to form a plan (Miller et a l . , 1960) have been examined. But the general factors of planfulness (Flavell, 1970) must

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underlie all intelligent application of strategic behaviors. Both the limitations and richness of the young child’s knowledge concerning the state and functioning of his own memory have been examined extensively by Flavell and his associates (Kreutzeret al., in press) and a detailed review will not be included here. Briefly however, recent studies have shown that such metamemorial (Flavell, 1971) processes as knowing how many items one can recall or accurately predicting one’s recall readiness (Flavell, Friedrichs, & Hoyt, 1970; Markman, 1973), are not well developed in young children. In addition, the very distinction between a set to memorize deliberatelyor just to look at items may be beyond the metamemorial functioning of very young children (Appel, Cooper, McCarrell, SimsKnight, Yussen, & Flavell, 1972; Shif, 1969). A form of “secondary ignorance” (Sieber, 1968) appears to be operating, for besides not knowing how to memorize efficiently, the young child does not seem to realize that he needs to memorize. He appears oblivious to the limitations of his memory capacity for reproductive tasks, and unaware that he can make more efficient use of his limited capacity by strategic intervention. Such a state of ignorance should not seem surprising in light of the ecological validity of strategic exercises in the life of the preschool child. The young child is seldom, if ever, required to reproduce exact information or to rote learn.“ Prior to the school years, the child has existed without the need to employ deliberate strategies of remembering. He has managed to acquire a language; he can comprehend an impressive set of conceptual relations; he can recognize familiar places and people and reconstruct meaningful events without the need to employ strategies. His emergent knowledge system is such that he can reconstruct the essential features of his past and deal intelligently with his present. It is only when he encounters material which is not inherently meaningful or must be reproduced exactly that deliberate memorial skills become’necessary. It takes time for him to recognize that these, in some sense artificial, situations exist and demand that he respond with something more than has been required in the past. He must, in fact, recognize that because of the nature of the material and the need for exact reproduction, he must apply a deliberate strategy or he will fail to retain the material. He can reconstruct what happened on his last birthday without such skills, but he cannot reproduce his phone number without them. Thus, along with the gradual emergence and refinement of specific memorial strategies, the child’s metamnemonic skills also develop as he is faced in‘This observation is, of course, culturally biased. It is the author’s impression that there is more stress on deliberate remembering in American compared with European nursery schools, and this may reflect different cultural emphasis. An interesting exception to the rule is that rhymes, accompanied by music, are readily acquired and can be reproduced exactly even by quite young children and relatively severely retarded individuals. The efficiency of using musical rhymes as information sources, while extensively used by media advertising aimed at children, and prograps like Sesame Street, has not been studied by developmental psychologists.


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creasingly with more demanding situations requiring reproductive recall. He learns to evaluate realistically the task demands (Moynahan, 1973), his memory ability (Flavell et al., 1970) and the interaction of his abilities and the task (Masur, McIntyre, & Flavell, 1973; Tenney, 1973). The development of knowledge about memory, memory monitoring (Flavell, I97 1), executive control of mnemonic activities (Butterfield, Wambold, & Belmont, 1973), and strategy transfer (A. L. Brown, 1974; Campione & Brown, 1974) have only recently received attention. However, such knowledge and beliefs concerning one’s own memory processes must play a vital role in determining if strategies and plans will be adopted and if appropriate plans will be used. Without such introspective knowledge, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to select an appropriate strategy at the onset of a task and to change or modify that strategy in the face of its success or failure. Indeed, a case could be made that it is the intention to use an appropriate strategy subordinated to the goal of remembering which is deficient in the developmentally young, not necessarily any specific memorial skill per se. Furthermore, as the failure to use strategies effectively is transsituational, attempts to train a specific memorial skill, without regard to metamemorial functioning, might be of limited value. Concentrating training efforts on metamemorial awareness and control (Butterfield et al., 1973) might be more productive in improving the cognitive functioning of the developmentally young. Considering the importance of metamnemonic knowledge for intelligent use of strategic behavior, the paucity of good research on the topic must be regretted.

B.

INVOLUNTARY

FORMSOF REMEMBERING

1. Memory and Intelligence As stated earlier, reproductive memory facilitated by strategic intervention is not the only form of memory. The vast majority of what we retain of our past experience, our semantic memory, our knowledge of the world, is the involuntary product of our continuous interactions with a relatively meaningful environment. This form of memory consists of our comprehension of rules and relationships involved in events, a comprehension which permits us to regenerate past experience in a suitable form for the needs of the moment. If we can extract meaning from a task or situation, we will “automatically get remembering” (Jenkins, 1971). The meaning is absorbed within and recreated from our existing operational schemata and, as such, it is difficult to separate memory in the broad sense from intelligence. Piaget and Inhelder (1973), also distinguished between the development of deliberate attempts at reproduction and the development of the operational schemata themselves, for memory development involves “not only quantitative changes in the acquisition, retention, and loss of (specific) data, or the capacity

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for immediate or deferred recognition and recall . . . but also the fundamental qualitative factor, namely, (changes in) the organization of the memory [Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 3791 .” The development of memory is seen as the gradual organization and reorganization of past experience, an organizational process which is closely dependent on the structuring activities of intelligence in general. “The schemata used by the memory are borrowed from the intelligence, and this explains why they follow one another in stages corresponding to the subject’s operational level [Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 3821.” The schemata of intelligence which intervene in the organization, interpretation, and reconstruction of memory are active in all phases of the memorial process, “during retention and recall no less than during the fixation of memories [Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 3831.” Thus, the basic schemata of the intelligence do not merely intervene to determine how we perceive material or events initially but are continuously active in organizing and reorganizing material during retention up to and including the time when those events are reconstructed. This Piagetian view of memory in the broad sense is expressed most eloquently by Piaget himself. The memory is a store of information that has been encoded by way of a process of perceptive and conceptual assimilation. The information itself, however, depends in part on the code. . . . Memory changes in the course of a subject’s development do not simply reflect the level of his encoding and decoding powers [i.e., strategies]: the code itself is susceptible to change during the conshvction of operational schemata. This explains why the level of memory organization differs with age, reflecting not only the coding level of the subject, but also the transformation of the code in the course of retaining the memory [Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 261.

For Piaget as for Bartlett (1932), memory is not a copy of events but a reflection of the subject’s current assimilation schemata. This view of memory as a continuously changing constructive process led Piaget to predict not only distortions and omissions but also “qualitative mnemonic improvement” with time. Here Piaget gave the example of memory for a long passage or lecture. It is quite possible that memory for the information (gist) contained in that lecture would be better after a period of time if during the interim the subject has gained relevant experience which produced better reorganization of the defective memory. In effect, the subject can reconstruct certain connections or central points “not merely forgotten but unnoticed in the first place [Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 3841 .” Piaget and Inhelder (1973) devoted their entire recent work to mapping the correspondence of the subject’s operational level to his memory for logical, causal, and spatial structures, both at the time of acquisition and during subsequent retrieval. Qualitative improvement in the child’s performance follows the pattern of improvement in his general operational level. Thus, memory in the wider sense and intelligence are difficult to separate according to the Piagetian position. Again, a quotation from Piaget illustrates the point excellently.


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Once we realize that in order to discover an organization we must either construct it or at least reconstmct it . . . and once we consider the memory adequate to this construction or reconstruction, we must also grant that it has an inner capacity for organization or reorganization, isomorphous with that of the intelligence. But, in that case, there is no reason for separating the two, rather must we consider the memory as part of the intelligence, though differentiated and specialized to perform a precise task, namely, the structuring of the past [Raget & Inhelder, 1973, pp. 400-401].

For Piaget, understanding, knowing, and remembering are inseparable facets of the intelligence-a point of view with obvious developmental implications. As the general operational level of the child undergoes changes with maturation and experience, so would we expect qualitative differences in his ability not only to perceive but to remember orderly relationships and meaningful events. 2. Memory and Meaning The Piagetian position described above has obvious similarities with the assimilation theory of language comprehension proposed by Bransford and Franks (1971) and Barclay (1973). Arguing against the assumption that meaning is conveyed by the linguistic structure of sentences, Bransford, Barclay, and Franks (1972) adopted the position that meaning is in the head of the listener and not in the sentence. “People carry meanings, and linguistic inputs merely act as cues which people can use to recreate and modify their previous knowledge of the world. What is comprehended depends on the individual’s general knowledge of his environment [Bransford et al., 1972, p. 2071 .” Similarly, Crothers (1972) asserts that the “proper unit of analysis both in memory and in discourse is . , . the overall knowledge structure and not a set of independent sentences [p. 2471. ” The constructive approach to comprehension and memory suggests that both involve an active process which uses the entire knowledge system of the subject; indeed, even machines need a knowledge system in order to comprehend (see also Winograd, 1972). The depth of understanding and strength of subsequent retention must be intimately related to what is already known. Knowledge (and interest) determines what is perceived and what is retained. Striking examples of the interplay between interest, knowledge, and memory are provided by observations of memory feats determined by cultural relevance (Colby & Cole, 1973). Bartlett (1932) recounted the story of a Swazi cowherd able to recall identifying marks and prices of hundreds of traded animals long after the complex transactions had occurred. Even within our culture the phenomenon can be observed. For example, chess players have their own knowledge system which determines what they perceive and remember (Binet, 1894). Master chess players and amateurs differ in their ability to reconstruct, e.g., a middle position from a chess game consisting of 24 pieces (Chase & Simon, 1973; DeGroot, 1966). If the position is a legitimate one, i.e., could occur in a game, the masters are able to reconstruct the position of most of the 24 pieces from memory. Even experienced amateurs

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can reconstruct only about eight pieces. If, however, the position is illegitimate, i.e., with the pieces placed randomly, there are no differences between Masters and weaker players. As Jenkins (1971) has pointed out “the head remembers what it does” or, as illustrated by the preceding example, what it is capable of doing. If memory and meaning depend on the subject’s knowledge of the world, then again, the developmental implications are obvious; for there must be an intimate relationship between what the child can do or construct at a particular stage in his development and what he can remember or reconstruct. If the to-be-remembered material is meaningful, and is congruent with the analyzing structures of the child, then comprehension of and subsequent memory for the essential features of that material will occur readily. With the exception of Piaget, however, developmental psychologists have concentrated almost exclusively on the child’s memory performance with meaningless materials. While the skills employed to deal with such situations are of obvious developmental importance and deserve attention, it is also reasonable to study the child’s performance in natural situations which have meaning for him. Jenkins made this point clear. “If we give (the head) higher order things to do, it retains the analysis of the higher order relations it extracts and uses these relations to generate products related to the initial activity. It seems to function very efficiently in pursuing such tasks. If, on the other hand, we give the head stupid things to do by ‘brute force’ it can only do relatively stupid things with the task and in the normal case it functions relatively inefficiently [Jenkins, 1971, p. 2851 .” If this is a fair characterization of the adult “head,” how much more descriptive it should be of the young “head” which is not yet equipped with a battery of skills for coping with situations divorced from the usual operations of intelligence. Piaget and Inkelder (1973) suggest that the fact that children forget so much of what they learn in school “clearly shows what happens to the memory once it becomes divorced from the exercise of the corresponding schemata (and this is a polite way of putting it), since the absurdity of a number of school practices is precisely that they divorce the memory of spontaneous activities from the intelligence and its operational schemata [p. 3961.” Insert the words “laboratory task” for the words “school practices” and we have a reasonable statement concerning the tasks studied by many developmental psychologists. Although there is a great deal of evidence of the young child’s difficulty with tasks focused on the goal of remembering in and for itself, there is little information on whether the child has the means of remembering in situations where memory is subordinated to a meaningful activity (Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969; Yendovitskaya, 1971). In Jenkins’ terms, if given higher-order things to do, can the young child perform efficiently? a. Memory for ideas: An early study. One of the earliest psychological ex-

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periments with children as subjects focused on memory for meaningful material. Binet and Henri5 (1894) studied memory for sentences and prose passages using protocols of children of between 8 and 13 years. They isolated two kinds of memory: verbal memory and memory for ideas. If asked to recall short phrases, the child uses his verbal memory (memory for surface structure) to give back verbatim recall of the actual words presented. When faced with the task of recalling lengthy passages of meaningful prose, the child remembers the underlying meaning and reconstructs a new (idiosyncratic) surface structure. Binet and Henri referred to this process as “verbal assimilation, i.e., when reconstructing a new surface structure in which to clothe the retained meaning, children tend to replace the original surface structure with syntactic constructions more characteristic of their own speech. In recalling long passages, the child retains only the underlying ideas and reconstructs these ideas in a syntactic and lexical form more appropriate to his linguistic level. ”

b. Semantic integration. Binet and Henri regarded the process underlying recon-

struction of prose passages as one of assimilation. Similarly, the contextual approach to meaning, exemplified by the work of Jenkins (1973), emphasizes the active construction and integration of semantic relations within existing cognitive structures. Indeed, Barclay (1973) labeled the contextualist approach to sentence comprehension as an “assimilation theory.” A series of studies concerned with semantic integration illustrates this point. In a recognition memory task requiring identificationof sentences previously seen in paragraphs, both adults (Bransford et a l . , 1972) and children (Paris & Carter, 1973) confuse original and new sentences which preserve the same semantic relationships, but readily discriminate new sentences which violate these relationships. Apparently, when faced with the task of comprehending and remembering paragraphs, both adults and grade-school children integrate the meaning and relationships perceived in the individual sentences into holistic situational descriptions and forget syntactic information, such as which felations occurred in which specific sentences. By the process of semantic integration, the listener improves comprehension and memory for the ideas being communicated by storing a holistic unit rather than several fragmentary ones. However, in the process, memory in the strict sense of exact recall of specific sentences may be impaired. Thus, comprehension of linguistic material involves the spontaneous construction and integration of semantic relationships, both explicit and implicit. sI would like to thank Dr. Joan W. Reeves of the University of London for bringing the Binet and Henri paper to my attention in 1964. Unfortunately, due to my extant cognitive structures at that time, I failed to appreciate its significance. I would like to thank Dr. William F. Brewer of the University of Illinois for bringing the Binet and Henri paper to my attention in 1974. At this stage, it was entirely congruent with my current knowledge system and became an integral part of this paper. Thanks are also due to Tom Thieman at Illinois for his translation of crucial parts of the manuscript.

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Children, as well as adults, make spontaneous assumptions when comprehending or reconstructing meaningful events and frequently fail to differentiate the information generated from such assumptions from information they actually saw or heard. An excellent discussion of the semantic integration phenomena in children exists elsewhere (Paris, in press) and, therefore, only a brief review of the literature will be included here. Paris and his associates (Paris & Carter, 1973; Paris & Mahoney, 1974; Paris, Mahoney, & Buckhalt, 1974) have documented the semantic integration phenomena in retarded children and normal children of between second and fifth grade. The phenomenon was found reliable when either pictures or sentences served as stimulus materials and when a variety of locative relationships were involved. Children do not store pictures or sentences as static copies of the originals, but incorporate the sequential relationships into unified representation or holistic units. Of interest is whether semantic integration ability improves with age. Paris (in press) has suggested that it may not be possibie to answer this question using a recognition memory paradigm, for such a task may prove insensitive to developmental changes in semantic integration. The older children in his studies committed fewer errors than the younger subjects. As the index of integration is the ratio of false alarm errors to true inferences (also technically recognition errors), this overall decline in error rate is a problem. As the older children make fewer errors, because of increased memory span, facility with strategies of remembering, etc., there is a strong possibility that any developmental effects would be masked in this paradigm. For these reasons, Paris and his associates (Paris, in press) have turned to a task where comprehension and memory for narratives are measured by free recall and a question-asking task. c. Memoryfor narratives. Considering the ecological validity of the narrative as an information source for young children and other preliterate peoples (Colby & Cole, 1973), methods of constructing and conveying meaning from this source are of particular interest. In his pioneering studies of memory for stories, Bartlett (1932) demonstrated that transmission of the gist of a narrative involves contortions and embellishments, presuppositions and contextual inferences, that reflect the interests and biases of the purveyors. Rarely is there accurate recall of the exact input, or, indeed, any attempt at verbatim recall unless a particular piece of information is sufficiently bizarre, or crucial to the main theme, to warrant exact reproduction. Both the interest of the material, or notoriety in the case of rumor spreading (Hunter, 1957; Sulin & Dooling, 1974), and the exact form of questioning (Loftus & Zanni, 1973) all influence subsequent reconstruction of both the main theme and specific details. The need to study cognitive development in situations of cultural relevance has lead anthropologists to consider memory for narratives because they play an important part in the maintenance and transmission of tradition in preliterate societies (Werner, 1966). Colby and Cole (1973) reviewed studies by Pany and


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Lord on narrative recall involved in South Slavic epic songs. The themes (ideas) and structures of the songs are traditionally determined and of great significance to the people. The singers perform great feats of memory, delivering different songs throughout the forty nights of Ramadan. Although the singers report that they sing the songs exactly as they have heard them from other singers, in actuality, the songs are greatly modieed by each individual singer and reflect his personality, individual creativity, and even the mood of the audience. The singer lacks the concept of a “fixed and sacred original version” of the song which requires exact reproduction. Rather, his idea of the stability of the song “does not include the wording, which to him has never been fixed, nor the unessential parts of the story. He builds his performance, or song in our sense, on the stable skeleton of narrative, which is the song in his sense [from Lord, 1965; quoted by Colby & Cole, 1973, p. 861.” By retaining the central ideas of the stories and learning certain stable “melodic, metric, syntactic and acoustic patterns,” the singer is able to retain many hundreds of such tales (tales which may last throughout the entire night), a feat which would be impossible if word-forword rote memorization were required. By learning the rules of structure and retaining the gist or central ideas, the singer is freed from the necessity of learning many stories verbatim and can concentrate on recurrent themes and patterns which can be changed and substituted for one another. It stories and songs are a major source of cultural information in preliterate societies, can a parallel be drawn with the preliterate child in Western cultures? The analogy may be weak, but stories do appear to play an important role in the early socialization of the child. Yet, psychologists have rarely considered how children extract meaning from stones. The Soviet investigator, Korman (quoted by Yendovitskya, 1971) found that preschool children behave in a manner comparable to adults. Required to reproduce fairy tales, they do not reproduce the material mechanically, rather, they omit minor nonessential happenings and concentrate on the central ideas, which they emphasize and embellish. Experimental studies on story comprehension have been sadly lacking in America; however, some recent studies with young children have been reported (Barclay & Reed, 1974; A. L. Brown, 1975b; A. L. Brown & Murphy, 1975; Paris, in press). Primarily due to previously mentioned problems with the recognition paradigm, Paris (in press, Paris & Upton, 1974) has turned to a memory-for-stories approach to the study of semantic integration and inference in children. Kindergarten through fifth-grade subjects listened to stories, followed immediately by a question-asking task where comprehension and memory of both contextual inferences (presupposition and inferred consequences) and lexical inferences (semantic entailment and implied instruments) were examined. Memory for both explicit (verbatim) and implicit (inference) information improved with age, as illustrated in Fig. 1 , even when a correction for differential response bias (d’) was introduced. In order to determine whether the enhanced ability to deal with

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Ann L . Brown

GRADE

Fig. I . A group showing d 's for verbatim and inferential questions as a function of grade level. (From Paris, in press.) Contort Inferanca 0 LaaIcaI Inferanca

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Fig. 2. Adjusted mean percent correct responses for inferential questions. Solid circle, contexi inference; open circle, lexical inference. (From Paris, in press.)


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inferences was dependent upon increases in capacity or span, per se, the effects of verbatim items were partialled out. These data are illustrated in Fig. 2, where it can be seen that there still remained a reliable improvement in inferential operations even when developmental differences in capacity or memory span for explicit information were taken into consideration, These data were replicated in a second study that also included a delayed free-recall attempt. Kindergarten children recalled 1.9 semantic units (ideas) per story compared with 4.4 and 9.3 for second and fourth graders. Within each grade level the best predictor (from the question-asking test) of subsequent free recall was the ability to make correct contextual inferences. Thus, spontaneously inferring consequences and making presuppositions may be an important contributor to the facility with which a child can both comprehend and retain the meaning of stories. These studies by Paris and his associates are extremely important as they illustrate that the child’s understanding and retention of implicit information does improve with age, a finding which was not readily apparent within the confines of the recognition memory studies of semantic integration (Paris & Carter, 1973). Furthermore, Paris has demonstrated that improvement in inferential reasoning is not simply due to increased memory capacity for the premise information (Bryant & Trabasso, 1971). As the child’s tendency to make inferences develops, his ability to understand and retain prose passages also improves (Paris, in press). Barclay and Reed (1974) failed to find evidence of an improvement in semantic integration beyond 5 or 6 years of age as kindergarten, first, third, and fifth graders were statistically indistinguishable in their recall of sentences containing either full passives or truncated passives as target sentences. When opportunities for semantic integration were not optimal (when the truncated passive was not followed by the nomination of a potential actor), the children recalled the sentences verbatim, a finding congruent with the adult literature (Slobin, 1968). When opportunities for semantic integration were established by introducing previously unmentioned actors elsewhere in the passage, the tendency to recall truncated passives verbatim decreased significantly, replicating the results of Bransford and Franks (1971). However, it should be noted that the truncated passive occurs in first-grade reading texts and, therefore, comprehension may involve a relatively simple form of semantic integration. When more complex inferential reasoning is required the ability to go beyond the information given improves with age (Paris, in press). An interesting finding in the Paris and Upton (1974) study is the low level of recall of the kindergarten children. If stories play an important part in the ecology of young children, then the poor recall scores are somewhat surprising. One might expect adequate retention of the essential ideas, even if many exact details have faded. Piaget (1969) and Fraisse (1963) believe that the poor recall of stories shown by preoperational children is a result of their failure to understand the concept of temporal sequence. The regeneration of a narrative relies on the

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Ann L. Brown

ability to reproduce the order of events, each event thus serving as a prompt, or retrieval cue, for the next event in the sequence. By maintaining the order, it becomes possible to capitalize upon causal or logical inferences to reproduce the story in the original sequence. The difficulty with the concept of temporal sequence is regarded by Piaget as the primary determinant of young children’s poor recall of narrative sequences. Before 7-8 years, children’s narratives remain “purely egocentric, i.e., events are linked together on the basis of personal interest and not on the real order of time [Piaget, 1969, p. 2721.” Similarly, Fraisse points out that children’s memories of stories are “completely jumbled up, for they have not learned to reconstruct their past; this is shown by the haphazard way in which they retell stories, for the order of events depends more on their interests or on incidental associations than on reality [Fraisse, 1963, p. 2541.’’ Shif (1969) reports the work of Zankov, who found that similar confusion existed in the recall of stories attempted by retarded children. These children tended to recall only scattered portions of the story, not the main events, with these portions ordered haphazardly. Anecdotally, however, children appear to be able to retell stories, or reenact the plot of television cartoons, before 5 years of age, particularly if allowance is made for their focus of interest. Korman (quoted by Yendovitskaya, 1971) reported frequent departures from the original sequences of events, but these departures were accompanied by logically defensible “jumps.” The integrity of the main theme was maintained. An interesting question, then, is whether the failure to retell a story in order is due to the young child’s lack of expository skills or whether it reflects a true failure to comprehend and hence reproduce ordered sequences imbedded in narratives. A series of studies from our laboratory examined children’s memory for the order of events in a story using three response modes, recognition, reconstruction, and recall (A. L. Brown, 1975b). In the Piagetian task, subjects were required to verbally retell the story-a recall task. However, Piaget himself (Piaget, 1968; Piaget & Inhelder, 1973) has demonstrated the developmental progression in the young child’s ability to regenerate past experience, with recognition easier than reconstruction which in turn produces better performance than recall. If the child experiences difficulty in his verbal recounting of a story because he generally has problems with recall tasks, then it is conceivable that he would be able to regenerate the information by means of reconstruction or recognition. If, however, the child fails to recall events in order because he has difficulty with the concept of order, per se, then the use of a developmentallyless mature response mode should not enhance his regeneration of order information. Kindgergarten and second-grade children were asked to listen to, or make up, five separate stories, each involving an actor and three distinct items. When a story was provided, the interactions of the actor with each of the three items

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could either be unconnected events (Random) or form part of the unfolding of a story or logical sequence (Ordered). Retention of the stories was measured by means of a free-recall or nonverbal reconstruction task, where the subject was required to arrange pictures of the items in the order they occupied in the story. The mean number of correctly ordered stories is illustrated in Fig. 3, where it can be seen that older children can regenerate the stories both by verbal recall and nonverbal reconstruction. In contrast, kindergarten children experience difficulty recalling the stories but are quite capable of reconstructing the sequence of events by nonverbal means. In a subsequent series of studies recognition of the correct order was also found to be far superior to recall, if care was taken in the choice of the distractor items (A. L. Brown, 1975b). a Second Grad. 0

OR0

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Fig. 3. The mean number of torally correct orders (out of jive) as a function of age, story condition, and response mode. ORD, ordered sequences; RAN, random sequences; 0 .S., own story. (From A . L . Brown, 19756.)

A reliable finding, recurrent throughout a series of similar studies, is that logical sequences, whether self-produced or imposed, are regenerated far better than arbitrary series of events (A. L. Brown, 1975 a & b; A. L. Brown & Murphy, 1975). As an example (A. L. Brown & Murphy, 1975), four-year-old children were given sets of four pictures which depicted either logical narrative sequences, or random series of events. In addition, the logical sets were presented in their correct order (Ordered) or jumbled (Scrambled). The proportions of completely correct reconstructions, after lags of between 0 and 5 intervening sets, are illustrated in Fig. 4. Consider first the Ordered vs. Random sets. Performance remained accurate over lags in the Ordered condition, but there was

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Ann L. Brown

a decline in accuracy as a function of increasing lag for the Random sets. A reasonable explanation of these findings is that when dealing with orderable material, subjects rely heavily on the inferential reasoning capacity of their semantic memory systems to construct or reconstruct logical orderings, whereas when dealing with random material, memory is basically episodic. Thus, the normal episodic memory pattern is found in the Random condition, high initial accuracy followed by a decline in performance with increasing lag. In the Ordered condition, subjects make use of meaningful relations to reconstruct the logical orderings. With increasing lag, specific episodic features tend to dissipate, whereas features essential to the meaning of the event or story are relatively resistant to decay (Brockway, Chemielewski, & Cofer, 1974; Tulving, 1972). ’*0°

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Fig. 4 . The mean proportion of ordprs correct as afunction of lag and stimulus type. {FromA. L. Brown and Murphy, 1975.)

An intriguing pattern of errors was found with the Scrambled sets. In this condition, subjects were required to disregard the inherent order of a set and reproduce the actually experienced order. Accuracy levels were always lower on Scrambled compared with Random sets, suggesting that disregarding an inherent order is a difficult task. If this-were the case, one might predict that errors on the Scrambled sets would be nonrandom. Of the 143 error trials, 51 (36%) were “correct11reconstructions in the sense of reproducing the logical rather than the viewed order. When the lag 5 error trials (67) were considered, 37 (55%) of the


I25

reconstructions followed the “correct order. ” Both values are significantly greater than the chance probability of .04.In his effort after meaning (Bartlett, 1932; Piaget & Inhelder, 1973) the child reconstructed a better order than the one he viewed initially. One problem with these studies was that the correct order of logical sets could be produced without experiencing a prior viewing trial, thus, it is difficult to separate reconstructive and constructive processes. To correct this problem the studies were replicated using pictures of isolated items as stimuli (A. L. Brown & Murphy, 1975). Logical or narrative sequences were imposed by providing a meaningful connective narrative linking the items. All subjects saw the same sets of pictures, sets which could not be ordered correctly without the viewing trial, however, half the subjects heard a connective narrative while the remainder did not. The results of the replication are presented in Fig. 5 , where the superiority of Ordered vs. Random sets is again apparent. 1.ooc

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Taken together the data support the hypothesis that in reconstructing sequences young children benefit from the presence of a unifying connective logic. Children, like adults, behave differently when required to reproduce arbitrary events in isolation from a larger context than when required to reconstruct meaningful unitized events (Horowitz, Lampel, & Takanishi, 1969; Jenkins, 1973). Arbitrary sequences are processed by the episodic system and acquisition and

1 26

Ann L. Brown

retrieval from episodic memory demand deliberate strategies and skills beyond the problem-solving capacity of the young child (A. L. Brown, 1974; Flavell, 1970). Logical sequences, however, are processed predominantly by the semantic memory system. When faced with the task of reconstructing a meaningful series of events, the preoperational child is capable of using logical connections to construct a holistic unit, i.e., to use the inferential reasoning capacity of semantic memory. In summary, narrative prose passages and songs are a powerful medium for the transmission of information for both preliterate societies (Colby & Cole, 1973) and young children. Preschool children can reconstruct meaningful sequences even when considerable intervening material is interprosed (A. L. Brown & Murphy, 1975). They spontaneously concentrate on central themes when reconstructing the gist of stories (Yendovitskaya, 1971) but experience difficulty recounting the sequence of events because of their immature expository powers (A. L. Brown, 1975b). As children mature, they become increasingly more efficient at recounting stories and more capable of deriving inferential relationships essential to the meaning of the story (Paris, in press). Increasingly, the maturing child capitalizes upon causal and logical inference founded on probability (Fraisse, 1963; Paris, in press) to reconstruct both the explicit and implicit meaning, to seek and produce the most probable order of events. d. Memory for meaningful activity. i. Incidental learning and the activity of the subject. If a child engages in a meaningful activity (Meacham, 1972) or experiences a meaningful event (Jenkins, 19731, he will retain the essential features of that activity whether or not a deliberate intention to remember has been evoked. Soviet psychologists have described this phenomena as “involuntary memory” which is largely the result of the incidental learning that accompanies the child’s active exploration of his environment (Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969). The general thesis is that memory depends on the “structure and contents of actions” and is a “permanent component of all behavior patterns, no matter whether remembrance be involuntary or intentional [Zinchenko & Smimov, 1966, p. 61.’’ Studies of incidental learning in children have focused predominantly on what Postman (1964) refers to as Type II paradigms. Here the subject is given a specific learning task during which he is also exposed to material which is irrelevant to the task as specified by the learning instructions. Hagen and his associates (Hagen, 1972) have documented the development of the child’s ability to ignore irrelevancies and to concentrate exclusively on relevant information during the course of a deliberate memorization task. Little attention has been paid to Postman’s Type I paradigm of incidental learning, where the subject is exposed to the stimulus materials but given no explicit instructions to learn. The degree of interaction between the subject and the material is determined by the


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nature of the orienting instructions. In a series of Type I incidental learning studies with adults, Jenkins and his associates (Hyde & Jenkins, 1969; Jenkins, 1971; Johnston & Jenkins, 1971) distinguished between comprehensionorienting instructions, which required the subject to understand the meaning of words, and formal-orienting instructions, which involved treating words structurally (checking the number of vowels, etc.). Comprehension tasks reliably resulted in free-recall and organization scores equivalent to those found under deliberate instructions to learn, whereas formal tasks produced significantly inferior performance. In general, the adult literature on Type I tasks supports Postman’s (1964) contention that intent to learn, per se, has no significant effects on learning. Instructions to learn facilitate performance only to the extent that they induce the subject to process the material in an appropriate manner, i.e., to process at a deep semantic level (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) or the level of associative meaning (Paivio, 1971). That it is the acfivily of the subject, rather than the intent to learn, that is important is of great interest to those concerned with memory in the young child (Meacham, 1972; Yendovitskaya, 1971). Rarely do preschool children adopt appropriate activities in responses to explicit instructions to learn (A. L. Brown, 1974; Flavell, 1971). Adults, who spontaneously adopt appropriate strategies when instructed to learn, perform equally well in incidental and intentional situations when both induce the appropriate activity. Children, however, fail to produce appropriate activities in response to explicit instructions to learn and, as such, should perform better in incidental situations which induce task, to analyze relevant activities. It is the execution of the plan (Miller et ~ l . 1960) at a semantic level (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) which leads to efficient learning, not the intention to learn in itself. Incidental learning in children, in the sense of executing a plan without intent to memorize, has rarely been studied by American psychologists, although the Soviet psychologist, Zinchenko (quoted in Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969; Yendovitskaya, 1971), conducted a relevant study. Preschool children performed equally well when asked to classify pictures, with or without instructions to remember. Both groups remembered more items than subjects instructed to remember by any means that might occur to them. A series of studies which combine the features of the Russian work with children and Jenkins’ studies with adults have recently been completed in our laboratory (Murphy & Brown, 1975). Preschool children were given two 16-item lists, one list under open-ended instructions ‘‘to remember” and the other under incidental orienting instructions. In the incidental phase of the experiment, the subjects were divided into five groups: a control group told to classify in order to remember, and four incidental learning groups not warned that item recall would be required. The four sets of incidental orienting instructions consisted of two sets of comprehension activities and two formal orienting tasks. The two comprehension tasks were designed to

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induce categorization. The first involved categorization in the context of a meaningful activity of buying items at a store, If, as suggested by Soviet psychologists (Yendovitskaya, 1971), memory is most efficient when subordinated to a meaningful activity, this task should produce superior recall than the activity of categorization in and for itself (comprehension task 2). The two formal tasks were also intended to vary in the degree of semantic analysis they would induce. The first required the subject to name the items and then say their first sound, while the second did not demand labeling but merely identification of the dominant colors. According to Paivio’s (1971) model, labeling should induce processing at least to the level of representational meaning, whereas in the absence of labeling, items could be processed in terms of their physical features without reference to their meaning. The recall and clustering scores, illustrated in the top half of Fig. 6, show the same pattern. No differences in recall or clustering were found between the baseline free-recall session and incidental-learning session involving formal orienting tasks (color and sound). In contrast, performance under comprehension incidental tasks was significantly better than performance in free-recall situations. Comprehension tasks produced better recall and clustering than formal tasks in preschool children as they do in adults (Hyde & Jenkins, 1969; Tresselt & Mayzner, 1960). Contrary to predictions, the incidental tasks did not form a continuum in the extent to which they influenced learning. Categorization, whether accompanied by explicit instructions to recall or occurring in the context of a meaningful activity, was no more efficient than categorization in and for itself. That categorization was equally efficient with or without intentional learning instructions confirms the finding of Mandler (1967) with adults and Zinchenko (Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969) with preschool children. The two formal tasks also did not differ. However, as the majority of children labeled spontaneously in both the sound and color conditions, differences in terms of levels of processing could not be assessed. One problem with interpreting the results of this experiment is that the comprehension tasks all involved the activity of taxonomic categorization, the appropriate strategy for memorizing an organized list. In this sense, the notion of “comprehension tasks” and that of ‘‘appropriate strategy” were confounded. However, the effectiveness of comprehension-orienting tasks with adults is not limited to those which produce the response of taxonomic categorization. The task most commonly used by Jenkins and his associates is rating the words as pleasant or unpleasant, while Tresselt and Mayzner (1960) required subjects to judge the degree to which words were instances of the concept “economic.” Furthermore, the Craik and Lockhart model cites, as the major determinant of learning, the degree to which the subject processes the material at a deep semantic level, i.e., understand the meaning of the words. Therefore, it was not

The Development of Memory EXPERIMENT

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Fig. 6 . The proportion of items correctly recalled and the degree of clustering as a function of experimental condition in both Experiments I and 2. Cat., categorization; S. Cat., categorization in the storefront activity; Cat. R.. categorization in ord$r to remember; N. N.,nice-nasty instructions; Cat., S. Car., and N. N.are comprehension tasks: Sound and color are formal tasks. (From Murphy and Brown, 1975.)

possible to determine, from this experiment, whether the comprehensionorienting tasks succeeded because they forced the children to adopt the most appropriate task relevant strategy, categorization, or because they induced the subjects to consider the meaning of the words. In order to clarify this point, the study was replicated using as comprehension tasks, the Jenkins' orientation of rating items pleasant or unpleasant, together with the categorization and the color tasks of the first experiment. The recall and clustering data from the second experiment are presented in the bottom half of Fig. 6, where it can be seen that the data replicate the original

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study. Comprehension tasks, whether they induce taxonomic categorization or not, produce better performance than both open-ended ‘‘remember” instructions (baseline) and formal orienting activities. These findings provide strong support for the hypothesis that intent to learn has no significant effect on memory (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Jenkins, 19’3; Postman, 1964). Instructions to learn or to remember enhance performance only to the degree that they induce an appropriate activity. Thus, the pattern for preschool children is different from that found with adults. For adults, instructions to remember elicit an appropriate plan of action (Mandler, 1967) while this is not the case with children (Appel et al., 1972). As preschool children do not spontaneously introduce appropriate activities when asked to remember, incidental situations which induce meaningful activities result in superior recall and clustering than situations involving openended instructions to learn deliberately.6 ii. Memory for some purpose. Consideration of these data reawakens the question of the “ecological validity” (Jenkins, 1971) of instructions “to remember” for the preschool child who has rarely been required to memorize deliberately and consequently has not developed a systematic series of strategic operations to deal with such eventualities. Apparently, the child is capable of remembering, even reproducing exactly, material with which he has interacted in a meaningful way (Murphy & Brown, 1975). Soviet psychologists (Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969; Yendovitskaya, 1971; Zinchenko & Smirnov, 1966) have argued at length that it is in the context of meaningful activity that memory is most efficient. Remembering as a goal in itself is not a meaningful aim for the preschool child (or very often for adults?). Memory as a means of obtaining a meaningful goal, however, can be understood by even very young children. For example, Istomina

TABLE I

MEAN NUMBER OF WORDS RECALLED (OUT OF FIVE) AS A FUNCTION OF THE PURPOSE OF REMEMBERINGa Age Purpose

4-5

5-6

6-1

0.6

15

2 .o

2.3

1 .o 2.3

3 .O 35

3.2 4 .O

3.8 4.4

Conditions

3-4

Memory as goal

Laboratory task

Memory as means

Play activity Practical activity

aFrorn Yendovitskaya (1971), p. 94. 6 A similar set of studies (Yussen, Levin, DeRose, & Ghatala, 1974) was brought to my attention after the completion of this chapter. In a Type i incidental learning situation, first- and second-grade children recalled and clustered more when they processed items semantically rather than physically. This held true when the type of processins was self-selected or imposed by the experimenter.


13 1

(quoted by Yendovitskaya, 1971) investigated retention of a list of five words when the task was a means of achieving a meaningful goal, or when memory of the list was the goal itself (as in laboratory tasks). The results are reproduced in Table I. Memory, in and for itself, is much less efficient than memory which is directed at some meaningful goal or purpose. “Only the presence of definite motives makes the mnemonic goal meaningful for the child [ Yendovitskaya, 1971, p. 931 .” The interaction of both deliberate and involuntary memory and meaningful activity in children deserves further attention.

c. DELIBERATEvs. INVOLUNTARY MEMORY: CONFLICT OR COMPLEMENT

The distinction has been made between deliberate strategies for remembering and memory which is the involuntary product of meaningful activity, with or without prior warning of impending recall. Here the interaction between the two forms of memory will be considered. First, consider the case that deliberate and involuntary forms of remembering are complementary. It is assumed within the levels of analysis model (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) that the degree to which the material is compatible with existing cognitive structures is a major determinant of the depth of processing. Similarly, it is also assumed that this compatibility interacts with deliberate attempts to analyze material to a deeper level. Two examples will be given here of enhanced memory in a deliberate paradigm when the material is tailored to fit the child’s current cognitive status. The first is the release from proactive interference paradigm. The second is the associative clustering, free-recall situation. In a release from proactive interference study, subjects are given several trials in which they observe a short list of stimuli (usually three or four words), engage in an overtly interfering task for about 30 seconds, and then attempt serial recall of the stimulus list. On each trial the stimulus list in drawn from words containing some features in common. Recall is quite accurate on the first trial but drops rapidly providing that the successive trials present words from the same category. On the release trial the stimulus category is changed (e.g., from animals to foods). Typically, performance returns to its original high level (release from proactive interference) but deteriorates again if trials are continued with the new stimulus class. The phenomenon is viewed as a sensitive measure of determining the categories that a subject actually uses, deliberately or involuntary, in encoding words. Several studies with children (Cermak, Sagotsky, & Moshier, 1972; McBane & Zeaman, 1970; Pender, 1969; Wagner, 1970) have shown the release phenomenon in children with some dimensions but not with others. Failure to obtain the phenomenon along a dimension presumably means that the dimension is not used for encoding at that stage of development. Of particular interest here is the

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fact that both. adults (Reutener, 1972; Wickens, 1972) and children (Pender, 1969; Wagner, 1970) show reliable release along categories, the criteria of which they are subsequently unable to identify. The suggestion is that the underlying semantic organization of the subject influences the manner in which he encodes stimuli, but that differential encoding is not necessarily the result of a deliberate strategy on the part of the subject (Posner & Warren, 1972; Wickens, 1972). As such, the release from proactive interference paradigm could provide a sensitive measure of developmental differences in semantic constructs, relatively uncontaminated by strategic transformations, as young and retarded children appear to differ from adults on the type of categories along which they show release but not in the release phenomenon itself. Whether the release is the result of automatic or deliberate differential encoding, it provides an example (in a deliberate memory paradigm) of enhanced memory if the material is tailored to fit the child’s head. Another example of a deliberate memorization paradigm where some consideration has been given to head fitting is that of free recall of organized lists. Although the developmentally young show relatively limited tendencies to cluster during free recall, there is some suggestion that young children may prefer different organizational structures from those used by adults. If this were true, providing an organization congruent with the child’s own should enhance the probability that he will use that structure in the process of remembering. Denney (1974) has reviewed the considerable literature which suggests that young children prefer organization based on thematic rather than taxonomic relations in free association tasks (R. Brown & Berko, 1960; Entwisle, Forsyth, & Muus, 1964; Riegal, Riegal, Quarterman, & Smith, 1968), free classification tasks (Annett, 1959; Inhelder & Raget, 1964), and matching tasks (A. L. Brown, Smiley, Murphy, & Overcast, 1974c; Kagan, Moss, & Sigel, 1963). Considering the pervasiveness of this organizational preference, Denney and Ziobrowski (1972) looked at clustering in free-recall tasks when the material was thematically or taxonomically related. They compared the performance of six-year-olds (when thematic relations predominate) and college students and found that six-year-olds clustered more on the thematic lists, while college students clustered more on the taxonomic lists. Thus, providing structure which is congruent with the child’s preferred organizational schemes enhances the possibility that he will spontaneously or deliberately note that structure and thereby enhance the probability of organized recall. Attempts to fit material to the “head” have not always been successful in improving recall. Both K. J. Nelson (1969) and Tenney (1973) addressed the head fitting problem, head-on as it were, by asking young children to provide their own material for subsequent recall. Nelson compared recall of a standard list (with a category structure based on adult norms) with recall of a categorized list containing the child’s own categories and examplars. No differences between


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self-produced and traditional categorized lists were reported. Similarly Tenney (1973) studied children’s recall of self-produced lists. Kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children were asked to make up lists that would be easy for them to recall. College students faced with such a task tended to behave in a systematic manner, generating lists with clear categorical structures (e.g., the numbers 1-50, the 50 states, instances from taxonomic categories and cities along a familar highway). When grade school children were asked to produce easy lists for recall, even the youngest showed some appreciation of the problem and named friends, family pets, numbers, or days of the week. However, although the young children did not differ from adults in the type of material generated, they did differ markedly in their degree of organization. They tended to jump back and forth between topics and to generate many miscellaneous words often neglecting to take advantage of the preordered nature of the materials they had selected. As with the Nelson study, Tenney found that providing self-produced material did not aid recall in the younger children. On the contrary, experimenterprescribed taxonomic structures were far more useful for younger children than any structure they devised themselves. Older children, in contrast, benefited from the inclusion of their own materal for recall. As older children almost exclusively generated lists that followed a category structure and younger children did not, this comparison is confounded. Young children failed to produce organized lists as they have little insight into the workings of their own memory. Although they took advantage of a category structure when it was presented, they did not foresee its usefulness. Consequently, they did not think of building structure into their self-generated recall lists. Due to deficiencies in his metamemorial functioning, it is not an easy task to induce the young child to help in the head fitting business-he doesn’t appreciate the limitations of his head. Next, consider the case for a conflict between deliberate and spontaneous remembering. Although there is some experimental evidence that the deliberate use of a specific strategy, particularly labeling and rehearsing, can interfere with more mature strategies (Flavell et a l . , 1970; Hagen, Meacham, & Mesibov, 1970), situations where use of a deliberate strategy could interfere with the ability to abstract meaning from the material, and, therefore, to remember it spontaneously, have not been examined. But it is conceivable that the rigid use of a dominant strategy may blind the child to a higher-level interaction with the material. For example, if a child is trained to rote rehearse series of digits such as 4 9 2 6 1 8 , 9 1 7 3 4 2, he may attempt to rehearse the set 1 2 3 4 5 6 embedded within such a series, failing to realize that rehearsal is not needed for such a meaningful set. The analogy here is to problem-solving tasks such as the Luchins’ water jar problem (Luchins, 1942) where facility with a successful complex solution, applied over a series of problems, leads the subject to adopt the complex rule even when a far simpler solution could be used. Thus, subjects

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trained to rote rehearse may also be less likely to notice and use redundancies (Spitz, 1973) in digit sets (such as 425, 425) than subjects not pretrained in the rehearsal strategy. The interplay between deliberate and involuntary forms of memory has received little attention to date; however, it would appear to be an interesting avenue for future research.

IV. A Model of Developmental Changes in Memory A. INTRODUCTION In this section, a guideline or organization scheme for studying developmental changes in memory will be presented. The scheme, like all simplified models, is at best a crude indicator of where to look for developmental differences and what kind of change one would expect to find. The intention is to provide a structure or organization to guide research rather than to suggest that the model reflects the ‘‘real world.” In the developmental literature, three main themes can be seen running throughout. The themes often take the form of dichotomies. For the purpose of the model, these dichotomies will be adopted, although the distinctions are better thought of as representing continua rather than dichotomous divisions. The three major dichotomies are, (a) between tasks which do or do not require strategies for their efficient execution; (b) between production and mediation deficiencies in the use of memorial and metamemorial skills; and (c) between episodic and semantic memory systems.

B . TERMINOLOGY 1. The Strategy-No Strategy Distinction

The first assumption of the model is that tasks will be developmentally sensitive to the degree that they demand strategic transformations for their efficient execution (A. L. Brown, 1974; Flavell, 1970). Note that the assumption includes the word degree for clearly there exists a hierarchy of tasks varying in the degree to which strategic intervention can be fruitfully applied. At the simplest level are those situations where efficient performance relies little upon active acquisition or retrieval strategies, or a working knowledge of one’s own strategic capabilities. At the highest levels are those tasks which require complex strategic intervention involving the flexible application, monitoring, and control of a variety of complex cognitive operations. Developmental differences will be found to the extent that such operations are demanded for efficiency because the developmentally immature do not spontaneously adopt appropriate plans


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(A. L. Brown, 1974; Flavell, 1970), nor do they possess the requisite insight into the workings of their own memory (Flavell et a l . , 1970) to appreciate this fact.

2. Mediation and Production Dejiciencies A further distinction which will form an essential feature of the model is that between mediational and production deficiencies in the use of both memorial and metamemorial skills. Again, the distinction has been amply discussed and documented in previous review papers (Flavell, 1970; Meacham, 1972), so only a brief statement will be included here. A mediation deficiency is said to be in effect when the subject is unable to use a potential mediator (strategy) efficiently even when he is specifically instructed and trained to do so. A production deficiency is implicated when the subject can be induced (e.g., through training or simple instructions) to use a mediator which he did not produce spontaneously. As with all three of the dichotomies, the mediation-production deficiency distinction is best seen as a continuum with children differing in the degree to which they display a deficiency. For example, Flavell and his co-workers have made the distinction between production deficiencies and production inefficiencies (Corsini, Pick, & Flavell, 1968). A production inefficiency refers to the stage where the child attempts to apply a potential mediator but does so ineptly due to some developmentally related limitation in his facility with that strategy. So once again, a continuum of ability is implied rather than a strict dichotomy. 3 . Episodic and Semantic Memory Systems The final distinction which will form part of the model is that between the semantic memory system and episodic memory, “the other kind of memory, the one that semantic memory is not [Tulving, 1972, p. 3841 .” An outline of the major differences between episodic and semantic memory is provided in Table 11. The episodic system invoIves the type of memory usually studied in the laboratory, i.e., the system, concerned as it is with the reproduction of directly perceived instances’ in isolation, involves retrieval of information that has been directly entered into the store on an earlier occasion. Criteria of success are

’Unfortunately the terms “events” and “episode” have been used by Tulving (1972) and Jenkins (1973) to refer to incompatible ideas. Tulving uses the term “event” as a “loose synonym of occurrence.” Events refer to instances which are distinctive and separate although part of a larger series. Thus, for Tulving, an event is a perceptible discrete unit or instance. Jenkins (1973) uses the term ”event” to refer to the holistic unit, consisting of the total meaning of an experience in context. To avoid confusion between these two incompatible usages of the word “event,” the term “instance” will be used herc for Tulving’s “events,” and “holistic units” to refer to Jenkins’ “events.”

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TABLE I1

MAJOR DISTINCTION BETWEEN EPISODIC AND SEMANTIC MEMORY SYSTEM Episodic

Semantic

1. Memory for directly experienced in-

Not necessarily dependent on personal experiences

2 . Concerned with temporal-spatial re-

Only concerned with temporal-spatial relations if they form an integral part of the meaning of the holistic unit

3. Memory for discrete perceptual in-

Memory for holistic units in context

4. Memory for relatively meaningless items, i.e., instances in isolation

Memory for meaningful systems, i.e., units in context

5 . Memory for actual input, usually reproductive

Memory for gist, usually reconstructive

6 . Criteria concern “correctness” or accuracy of response compared with input

Divergence from input as interesting as “correct” responses

I. Does not include the capability of infer-

Includes the capability for inferential reasoning, generalization, application of rules, etc.

stances

lations of experienced instances

stances that are distinct and separable from the larger unit in which they occur

ential reasoning or generalization

usually measured against the accuracy of the reproduction compared with the input. Finally, the system does not include the “capabilities of inferential reasoning or generalization.’ ’ The semantic memory system is concerned with memory for meaningful holistic units experienced in context. Semantic memory does not register perceptual properties of inputs except to the extent that they permit “unequivocal identification of semantic referents of the event [Tulving, 1972, p. 2881 .” As a result, identical changes in semantic memory can result from a whole variety of different inputs. As the system does not rely on actual input, or personally experienced instances, it is possible to retrieve information from semantic memory which was never directly experienced. Retrieval from the system includes imaginative reconstruction of the meaning or ideas fundamental to the information and involves the total knowledge system of the individual. As a result, there are no “errors” in retrieval (other than omissions, or failure to retrieve) as all responses reflect the semantic memory system. Measures of interest become such things as false alarm recognition scores (Cramer, 1972, 1973) and synonym substitutions (Binet & Henri, 1894; Brewer, 1974a; E. V. Clark, 1972), technically errors but actually the data of principal interest. As the input conditions responsible for the existing semantic structure are seldom

The Developmeni of Memory

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known, experimenters are relatively freed from the preoccupation with measuring exact input-output correspondences. Finally, since retrieval from the system is by means of active constructive processes, important methods of using information stored in semantic memory are inferential reasoning, generalization, application of rules and formulas, etc., methods which involve the total dynamic knowledge system of the individual. While these distinctions are relatively clear, identifying various tasks as either episodic or semantic may not only be difficult but not particularly informative due to the essential interdependenceof the two systems. The assignment of tasks to either category is one of degree and depends in part upon the kind of question or requirement addressed to the memorizer. For the purposes of the model, the episodic-semantic distinction has been adopted with the understanding that assignment to either end of the continuum is somewhat arbitrary.

C. THEMODEL 1. The Ideal Model Two major types of developmentaI effects will be discussed, level differences and pattern differences. The analogy is from an analysis of variance model. A level difference would be a main effect of developmental stage, while a pattern difference would be reflected in interactions between developmental stage and task variables. As a concrete example, consider studies of free recall of categorized lists. Performance improves with age (amount of clustering), a level difference. In addition, interactions between developmental level and the type of categorization (e.g., taxonomic vs. thematic) are frequently obtained, a pattern difference. Serial position curves also show level and pattern differences. Again amount of recall increases with age, a level difference, and there are interactions between developmental level and the shape of the curve (elevated primacy and recency for older subjects, only recency for younger subjects), a pattern difference. The major distinctions made thus far, between strategic and nonstrategic tasks and between episodic and semantic memory, are seen as jointly determining both when developmental differences will occur and, if they occur, what type(s) of differences, level or pattern, would be expected to emerge. The basic idea is illustrated in Fig. 7. Memory tasks are divided roughly into those which do and those which do not demand mnemonic strategies for their efficient execution. If mnemonic strategies are required, the developmentally young should perform poorly compared with more mature subjects, for they fail to employ mnemonic strategieseffectively (A. L. Brown, 1974; Flavell, 1970).Further, there would be differences in both overall levels of performance and patterns of performance. If, however, mnemonic strategies are not required, then developmental differences would be expected only to the extent that the task taps the semantic basis of

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Ann L . Brown Developmental differences, levels and patterns

t

YES

episodic task

semantic

Least sensitive to developmental differences

+ mfferent patterns possible

Fig. 7 . The memory model: The strategy-no strategy distinction.

memory. If the task is entirely episodic in nature with no extra-episodic reference, then the task should be relatively insensitive to developmental stage. If, however, the task does tap semantic features, then developmental differences would be expected in the pattern but not necessarily the level of performance. The inclusion of the production vs. mediation deficiency distinction is necessary for the next stage of the model, as the interrelation of production and mediational deficiencies with the processes already described yields the more complex model schematized in Fig. 8. Thus, when a task requires mnemonic strategies, the subject can spontaneously adopt the required strategy. In this case, he will perform efficiently, and developmental differences would be expected only to the extent that the task is semantic in nature or the strategy is performed inefficiently. If the subject does not spontaneously produce the strategy, the question is, can it be induced with suitable intervention? If it cannot, a mediational deficiency is said to be operating, and the developmentally young should perform poorly. If, however, the appropriate strategy can be induced, the original deficiency is one of production. Developmental differences following successful remediation of a production deficiency would again be expected only to the extent that the task taps the semantic basis of memory, or the strategy is used inefficiently by the subject. At this point, the basic taxonomy is completed. Thus, memory tasks would be expected to differ in the degree to which they are developmentally sensitive. Tasks which do not demand strategic intervention and are primarily episodic in nature will be the least sensitive to developmental factors. Tasks which do not demand mnemonic strategies but are sensitive to changes in the underlying


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YES

Mllerence in levels, not patterns

Medlalian deficiency, diIIereiiee in levels and patterns

Porisible differences, prlmarily In patterns

strategy

0-

developmental Least sensitive differences iu

I . semani'c

Possible dillerenees, primarily in patterns

Fig. 8 . The memoty model, including the three continua-strategy-no tic, and production and mediation deficiencies.

strategy, episodic-seman-

semantic structure of memory will show developmental differences in the pattern of performance (types of false recognitions, quality and nature of clustering, etc.) but not necessarily in the level of performance. Tasks which do require mnemonic strategies yield more possibilities regarding developmental differences. If the strategy is not produced and cannot be induced, differences would be expected in terms of both patterns and levels. If the strategy can be induced, the prediction is determined by the nature of the task, episodic or semantic. If it is primarily episodic, the prediction is for different levels if the strategy is not used efficiently, although the patterns should be similar. If the task is semantic, primarily pattern differences would be predicted.

2. The Four Ideal Tasks As mentioned earlier, the model is an ideal representation of the nature of memory tasks. The value of any such model is the extent to which it leads to differential predictions and clarifies rather than confuses. In this section, the possibility of providing concrete examples of the idealized distinctions contained within the model will be examined, beginning with examples of the four types of tasks resulting from the factorial combination of episodic-semantic and strategic-nonstrategic. a. Nonstrategic-episodic. An ideal nonstrategic-episodic task is one that does not demand any obvious strategy for efficient performance and is episodic in

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nature, i.e., completely independent of the semahtic memory system. Such an ideal task does not have a strict counterpart in reality, as all tasks are to some extent susceptible to strategic transformation, and all tasks involve to some extent the semantic memory system. The information in the semantic memory system is obviously involved in the identification and encoding of events even when the main requirements of the task are episodic in nature. Therefore, this cell will include tasks which are the least likely to demand active retrieval or acquisition strategies and the ability to monitor them, and the least dependent on the semantic system. It would follow from the model that such tasks should be the least sensitive to developmental trends. The first contender for inclusion in this cell is recognition memory for unrelated pictures, for the task does not require active plans for acquisition and is relatively independent of retrieval strategies. Although the semantic system is involved in identifying the items, the task is predominantly episodic as it involves a decision as to where and when an isolated item occurred in our personally experienced past, What empirical evidence exists would support the contention that the task is relatively insensitive to developmental trends. The ability of three- to five-year-old children to recognize repeating pictures approximates that of adults (A. L. Brown & Campione, 1972; A. L. Brown & Scott, 1971; Corsini, Jacobus, & Leonard, 1969). K. E. Nelson (1971) found equivalent retention in picture recognition across the age range from 7-13 years. Similarly, mildly retarded children show excellent levels of recognition memory for pictures (A. L. Brown, 1972, 1973c; Martin, 1970). The problem with interpreting the data from picture recognition tasks is that such interpretations are contaminated by the ceiling effect, so far found for all ages, which could mask any developmental trends. To overcome this problem, an episodic task is required where adults’ performance is good but not perfect and no obvious mnemonic is required for efficient performance. A suitable candidate appears to be the discrimination of relative recency tasks (Yntema & Trask, 1963), for adults’ performance is not on the ceiling and the ability to process and retrieve this form of temporal information does not necessarily rely on the use of a deliberate strategy (Hintzman & Block, 1971; Underwood, 1969; Zimmerman & Underwood, 1968). Therefore, if storing of the relative temporal position of an item is not necessarily under the subject’s control, no deliberate mnemonic would appear to be a prerequisite for accurate performance. Furthermore, coding an isolated item in terms of its temporal-spatial relations with other isolated instances is an archetypical episodic task. If developmental effects are found only in relation to the appropriate use of mnemonics, or on tasks which rely on semantic memory, the ability to discriminate relative recency should be developmentally insensitive. Evidence from our laboratory essentailly supports this prediction, In a series of studies on relative recency judgments in children (A. L. Brown, 1973a, 1973b; A. L. Brown, Campione, & Gilliard, 1974), no


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developmental effects were reported when the judgments of recency were required for isolated items, with no additional spatial or contextual cues to serve as anchors. Children of 7 years performed on a par with 8- and 10-year-olds and with college students. There are three sets of apparently disconfirming evidence. The disconfirming evidence from our laboratory concerns the performance of children under 7 years of age. It proved impossible to gain relative recency judgment information in the continuous paradigm of Yntema and Trask (1963) and A. L. Brown (1973a), as the younger children refused to cooperate. When simpler tasks were introduced, a developmental trend between 4 and 7 years became apparent in the ability to recall order information. In the Yntema and Trask task, the subject is presented two items he has seen before and is required to state which occurred more recently-in essence, this is a recall task as information concerning order is not contained in the stimulus item. In a series of studies (A. L. Brown, 1975b; A. L. Brown & Murphy, 1975) recognition and reconstruction of orders or sequences was found to be extremely efficient in young children (4 years old) and no developmental trends were apparent. However, children above 7 years were more efficient in recalling order information (see Section 111, A, 1 for a discussion of Piaget’s developmental progression from recognition, to reconstruction, to recall, and Section III, B, 2 on memory for narratives in children). The other disconfirming data concern children in the age range (7- 18) of the original paper (A. L.Brown, 1973a). Whereas Brown reported no developmental trend on the Yntema and Trask (1963) continuous recency task,von Wright (1973) did find differences between 8 -13 years of age. Close inspection of these data reveals that the main differences occurred when the test item immediately followed exposure of the most recent inspection item (0 lag condition). The older children were virtually errorless on such problems while the younger children were not. In the A. L. Brown (1973a) study, pretraining ensured virtually errorless performance on these 0 lag problems. On problems with larger lags, the levels of performance in the von Wright study were essentially similar to those reported by A. L. Brown (1973a). Mathews and Fozard (1970) also reported developmental differences in a recency judgment task with children of above 7 years; however, they used short sequences of 7- 12 items compared with the 120-item sequence used by Brown. The use of short lists may have encouraged the older subjects to rehearse, organize, or number the items. An attempt to rehearse a seven-item list would not seem unreasonable. The developmental trend, therefore, represents an increased use of mnemonics by the older subjects. Indeed Mathews and Fozard reported that not only did the deliberate use of such strategies increase with age but it was related to superior performance. Although rehearsal may be an appropriate strategy to employ in recency tasks using short sequences, it may be inappropriate for long sequences. In support of

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this is the fact that only 22%of college students (A. L. Brown, 1973a) reported any rehearsal attempt or the application of a deliberate strategy and half of these abandoned the effort. The use of a deliberate mnemonic appears inappropriate for long lists and is unrelated to efficient performance. Thus, the judgment of recency task is one which can be either strategic or nonstrategic depending upon the way the question is formulated. The provision of short lists in the Mathews and Fozard study encouraged active rehearsal strategies and, therefore, the task no longer fits the episodic-nonstrategic cell. In summary, prime candidates for inclusion in the first cell are recognition memory and relative recency judgments for series of unrelated items. Taken as a whole, the data support the contention that these primarily episodic tasks require little strategic intervention and are, as a consequence, relatively insensitive to developmental trends. b. Strategic-episodic. The vast majority of laboratory tasks conducted with children would be included in the strategic-episodic cell. Required to rote learn sequences of isolated instances for subsequent reproduction, the mature memorizer employs an amazing array of skills to make the most efficient use of his limited memory capacity for such information. In contrast, the young child fails to harness such strategies, not only because of a limited (or nonexistent) repertoire, but also because he fails to realize that such skills are required. Extensive documentation of the young child’s production deficiency with both mnemonic and metamnemonic plans and tactics predicate this chapter (A. L. Brown, 1974; Flavell, 1970; Kreutzer et al., in press; Meacham, 1972), so concrete examples will not be provided here. So far, this cell not only seems easy to fill with supporting empirical data but seems simple conceptually as well. Nothing is ever this simple. The deceptive simplicity stems from the use of dichotomous divisions rather than continua. Tulving included in his definition of episodic tasks, situations which vary widely in the degree to which they tap the semantic memory system. For example, episodic information concerning meaningful or related words would rely more heavily on semantic information than would episodic tasks with unrelated words or nonsense syllables. In recognition of this fact, Tulving singled out studies of associative clustering and organization as exceptions to the usual practice of scoring only “correctness” of responding in episodic tasks. Obviously, the knowledge structure of the individual must come into play when he is faced with recall of related words. Thus, the degree to which the semantic system can be referred to in a strategic-episodic task will determine the type of developmental difference found. If semantic memory plays a large role then the developmental difference will be in both levels of performance (better performance with the use of strategies) and patterns (reflecting the influence of the semantic memory system). If the semantic system is relatively uninvolved, the developmental differences will be primarily in levels.


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Another complication becomes apparent when we consider the impact of an efficient strategy on an episodic task. A rough characterization of a good strategy is that by using it, the memorizer attempts to impose meaning on a relatively meaningless input. He attempts to embed the material within a context or to provide it with the characteristics of a holistic unit by means of elaborative techniques such as the method of loci (Yates, 1966) or by providing a miniature world or context such as a connective story. To the extent that such mature strategies are successful, the artificial dichotomy between episodic and semantic systems becomes even more artificial. And to the extent that the mature memorizer can successfully impose meaning, developmental differences should occur not only in levels but also in patterns of performance. Thus, on episodic tasks that require strategies, developmental differences in terms of overall efficiency would be predicted, as suggested in the model. However, whether or not pattern differences, reflecting the underlying semantic structure, will be found depends on the extent to which the episodic task taps the semantic system or can be made to tap this system by means of the strategy adopted to impose meaning on the input. c. Nonstrategic-semantic. The type of task which would fit the nonstrategic-semantic cell is one where the automatic result of meaningful activity is retention, at least to the extent that the gist can be reconstructed at a subsequent date. If the material is meaningful and the child interacts with it in an interesting activity, &liberate mnemonic strategies should not be required for retention of at least the gist, and sometimes even exact input (Murphy & Brown, 1975, Yendovitskaya, 1971). The child can reconstruct the essential features of a prior experience because of his interest in and comprehension of that experience, not because he intended to remember. Developmental differences on such tasks would reflect changes in semantic memory, relatively uncontaminated by strategic intervention. The developmental trends should reflect the close correspondence between the operational level of the child and his involuntary memory for meaningful events. If material fits the head, memory for the substance of that material will be involuntary. If the material does not fit the head, the task will be essentially meaningless (if too difficult) or uninteresting (if too easy). Thus, the child’s level of intellectual development interacts with the material to determine what falls within the domain of semantic memory. If the material is congruent with the child’s operational level, it will be perceived and retained as meaningful, i.e., the task is semantic. If, however, the child is insufficiently mature to perceive a logical or meaningful structure in the material, he will treat it as a meaningless situation and retention will demand the application of deliberate memorial skills. Our current picture of the young child’s memorial poverty has been generated largely by his performance on tasks requiring deliberate strategies where the primary goal is to remember, rather than situations where memory serves as a

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mans of achieving an interesting end product (Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969). We have, as yet, little information concerning the young child’s memory for information gleaned from culturally relevant situations; information which is both compatible with the child’s extant analyzing structures and interesting in terms of the ecology of young children. Therefore, an interesting avenue for future developmental research would seem to be the nonstrategic- semantic tasks which may prove fruitful in revealing the richness rather than the poverty of memory in early childhood. d. Strategic-semantic. As mentioned earlier (Section 11, D), even though semantic memory may be largely the result of nonstrategic processes, this does not exclude the possibility that deliberate strategies may be used to enhance comprehension and subsequent retention of meaningful events. It certainly seems reasonable to propose that the mature information processor is capable of enriching his comprehension of events by deliberate means. What these means may be can only be surmised at this stage, but deep levels of comprehension may be achieved by consciously expanding, elaborating, paraphrasing, and editing as the material dictates. Deliberate attempts to focus on the central theme, to observe inferences and nuances of meaning, and to capitalize on logical and causal relationships may all be initiated in the effort to comprehend. Such strategies of comprehension, although purposeful acts, may be qualitatively different from those skills evoked to deal with episodic reproductive tasks, but would still be forms of strategic interventions. Studies of reading comprehension in adults have shown that alerting subjects to important content areas by (a) providing thematically relevant titles (Dooling & Lachman, 1971), (b) asking subjects to perform specific search tasks with the text materials (Frase, 1972), or (c) requiring the application of principles to new examples (Watts & Anderson, 1970), all improve performance. Even presuppositions concerning the text context affect subsequent comprehension and retention (Dawes, 1964, 1966). Rothkopf‘s (1972) concept of a general group of “mathemagenic activities” includes those activities which result in a heightening, expansion, or focusing of the observational powers of the reader. If such deliberate attempts to glean the gist of a written passage exist, then presumably comparable strategies for extracting meaning from other sources also form part of the cognitive repertoire of the developmentally mature individual. If there are deliberate strategies for enriching semantic memory then developmental differences in the ability to comprehend and retain meaningful material would be expected. But separating out the effects of deliberate intervention from effects due to general cognitive maturation may prove to be a difficult task for the developmental psychologist. For example, the ability to make contextual inferences improves during the early grade school years, and this ability is related to enhanced memory for the idea units of the material (Paris, in press). But is this the automatic result of maturation of the judgment and


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reasoning capacity of the child, e.g., his ability to make inferences, to comprehend cause and effect relationships, etc. (Piaget, 1928), or is it the result of an increasingly deliberate foray after meaning? This and many more questions need to be addressed. Thus, an examination of the processes involved in the construction and reconstruction of meaning, whether spontaneous or deliberate, would seem to be an exciting area of future research, particularly for the developmental psychologist, and considering the importance of head-fitting (Jenkins, 1971), both educationally and theoretically, the vacuum in the cells concerned with semantic memory is regrettable.

D. THEUTILITY OF THE MODEL In order to develop a simple predictive model of developmental memory phenomena, four cells were constructed to represent ideal situations. From this practice, one thing at least has become clear; developmental psychologists in the past have been concerned primarily with two of the cells, those concerned with episodic memory situations. Indeed, as a result of the preoccupation with strategic skills of remembering isolated materials, the vast majority of data can be included in only one cell, the strategic-episodic cell. If the present exercise has any value, it may be in highlighting this preoccupation and in suggesting new questions for developmental research. The second, less positive, result of this exercise is that the difficulty of dividing memorial situations into simple dichotomies is amply documented. Not only are the dichotomies themselves inadequate, but the interaction between them is a complex multidimensional one rather than the relatively simple model provided here. Yet, the very simplicity of the model may increase its predictive power. The utility of the model lies not in its exact correpondence with real situations, but in its function in raising questions concerning why we predict developmental differences and what the nature of those differences should be.

V. Summary As the title would suggest, the focus of this paper has been three main aspects of memory and their ontogenesis. The first, “knowing,” refers to the developing knowledge of the world, or semantic memory, which the child brings to all memorial situations be they deliberate or involuntary. A relative lack of prior interest dictated the concentration of effort given to this topic and the attendant literature review. The two other aspects mentioned in the title, “knowing about knowing” and “knowing how to know” have received more prior attention and, therefore, were treated superficially in this paper. While it is true that the lion’s share of attention was focused on the semantic system, no attempt to belittle the importance of memorial or metamemorial skills

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was intended. Both the acquisition of mnemonic strategies and the ability to monitor and control them effectively are esential skills which must be mastered by an efficient information processor. Only when the child has mastered such skills can he begin to deal efficiently with an increasingly complex environment. Rather, this paper was seen as a complement to existing reviews of strategy development (A. L. Brown, 1974; Flavell, 1970; Meacham, 1972) and metamemorid awareness (Kreutzer et al., in press), designed to draw attention to a neglected area of developmental research. Finally, the original question raised in this paper was “What is memory?” Whereas it may be impossible to provide a definitive answer to such a global question, it is possible to specify the type of memory involved in any one task and how this is related to memorial processes in the broader sense. By providing a rubric, a model of developmental changes, a series of questions have been raised which can be used when deciding “what memory is” within the confines of laboratory tasks. Furthermore, the model suggests not only where or when developmental trends should be manifested but what type of developmental effects one would predict.

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Knowing me, knowing you.

Is all knowing personal knowing?

Knowing the allograft's destiny.

Knowing the code.

Knowing where the nose is.

Treating before knowing.

Families in crisis; knowing when and how to help.

Patients' experiences of an initial consultation in oncology: knowing and not knowing.

Knowing does not imply understanding.

Gender differences in knowing about hypertension: the black experience.

Knowing You, Knowing Me (KYKM): an interactive game to address positive mother-daughter communication and relationships.

Maintenance rehearsal affects knowing, not remembering; elaborative rehearsal affects remembering, not knowing.

Vision. Knowing where you're going.

Information needed to support knowing the patient.

Knowing that you know: an essay on mechanistic metaknowledge.

AIDS in rural Zimbabwe.

Contextual information influences the feeling of knowing in episodic memory.

On knowing your own history.

"Knowing What You Don't Know": Language Insight in Semantic Dementia.

Nano-cartography: knowing where to look.

Batteries: Knowing when small is better.

Postcolonial theory, nursing knowledge, and the development of emancipatory knowing.

The advantage of knowing the talker.

Feeling of knowing and restudy choices.