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Context reinstatement effects in children’s cued recall of strongly and weakly associated word pairs

journal contribution
posted on 2011-01-01, 00:00 authored by Paul Dietze, Stefanie SharmanStefanie Sharman, Martine Powell, Don ThomsonDon Thomson
Typically, asking people to reinstate the context of events increases their recall of those events; however, research findings have been mixed with children. We tested whether the principle underlying context reinstatement applies to children as it does to adults. This underlying principle, encoding specificity, suggests that the greater the overlap between study context cues and retrieval context cues, the more information that people should recall. In the current experiment, four age groups (7-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds and adults) took part in an encoding specificity procedure. At study, participants saw cue– target word pairs in which the cue word was either a strong or a weak associate of the target word (e.g., ice–COLD; blow–COLD). During an immediate cued recall test, participants were presented with the same strong or weak cue words and new, extra-list cue words. Overall, children and adults recalled more targets when they were presented with the same cue words at study and test, regardless of whether the cues were strong or weak. This finding suggests that encoding specificity applies to children as well as adults. We discuss the implications of these results.

History

Journal

Australian educational and developmental psychologist

Volume

28

Issue

2

Pagination

91 - 100

Publisher

Australian Academic Press

Location

Nedlands, W.A.

ISSN

0816-5122

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2011, Australian Academic Press

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