Intending to forget: the development of cognitive inhibition in directed forgetting.

The thesis of this research is that children's cognitive inhibition increases in efficiency with age over the middle childhood years, and this increasing efficiency contributes to developmental improvements in memory performance. To explore this thesis, the development of efficient retrieval inhibition, defined as the suppression of activation and retrieval paths to information stored in long-term memory, was investigated. In Experiment 1, first, third, and fifth graders and adults participated in a directed-forgetting experiment. Using a blocked-cuing procedure, subjects were given a "forget" or "remember" cue halfway through an unrelated free-recall list. At recall, subjects were asked either to remember all the words (even the ones they had been instructed to forget) or to remember only to-be-remembered words. The results suggested that the ability to intentionally inhibit the maintenance and recall of irrelevant information improves gradually over the elementary school years, but is not fully mature by fifth grade. Children were less able than adults to inhibit the to-be-forgotten words, and they were less able to withhold production of remembered to-be-forgotten words than were adults. Experiment 2 replicated the development effects found in the first experiment and demonstrated that the developmental differences in performance were due to differences in mnemonic processing rather than differences in the ability to understand the instructions of the tasks.

Nonstrategic facilitation of children's recall: evidence of triage with semantically related information.

When children and adults recall unrelated materials, they tend to produce words in a weaker memory strength-->stronger memory strength-->weaker memory strength order (the cognitive triage effect). This pattern is associated with recall accuracy. The present research investigates whether similar patterns occur when children recall lists of semantically related words that support the use of mnemonic organizational strategies. The optimization model predicts triage patterns regardless of list composition; the classic strategy model predicts categorical organization of recall for categorically composed lists. In Experiment 1, fourth and seventh graders recalled lists of typical and atypical exemplars from several different categories. In Experiment 2, second and sixth graders recalled lists of categorized or unrelated words. In both experiments, children's recall followed triage patterns based on on-line assessments of memory strength (error/success histories). Analyses of recall order, memory strength grouping, and the correlation between strength grouping and recall accuracy in both experiments supported the conclusion that children order their recall according to on-line memory strength, regardless of list composition.