German Institute for International Educational Research, D-60486 Frankfurt, Germany.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2012 Mar;111(3):552-60. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2011.10.013. Epub 2011 Dec 22.
Several studies on free recall suggest that processes responsible for recall are analogous to processes responsible for rehearsal. In children, the relationship between cumulative rehearsal and recall performance has been proven to be critical; however, the locus of the effect of rehearsal is not yet fully understood. To unfold the mechanisms that come into play in an overt rehearsal free recall task, we assessed rehearsal and recall sequences in children between 8 and 10 years of age. These sequences give information about the context in which items are repeated and rearranged throughout the list and subsequently recalled. Rehearsal sequences consisted mainly of items from neighboring list positions in their original temporal order. The same characteristics were true for recall sequences. Qualitatively, order effects during study and recall did not differ over age groups. However, in older children who were using cumulative rehearsal more intensively, successive rehearsal and recall of items in their original order was more pronounced. Therefore, we suggest that a main feature of item rehearsal with regard to facilitating recall is the strengthening of interitem associations based on the temporal order within a list and that this characteristic develops with age.
几项关于自由回忆的研究表明，负责回忆的过程与负责复述的过程类似。在儿童中，已经证明累积复述和回忆表现之间的关系至关重要；然而，复述的影响部位尚未完全理解。为了揭示在公开复述自由回忆任务中起作用的机制，我们评估了 8 至 10 岁儿童的复述和回忆序列。这些序列提供了有关项目在整个列表中重复和重新排列的上下文的信息，随后进行了回忆。复述序列主要由原始时间顺序中相邻列表位置的项目组成。回忆序列也是如此。定性地，研究和回忆过程中的顺序效应在年龄组之间没有差异。然而，在更频繁使用累积复述的年龄较大的儿童中，按原始顺序连续复述和回忆项目更为明显。因此，我们认为，项目复述促进回忆的一个主要特征是基于列表内的时间顺序加强项目之间的关联，并且这种特征随着年龄的增长而发展。
