Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Dev Sci. 2018 May;21(3):e12559. doi: 10.1111/desc.12559. Epub 2017 Mar 12.
The emergence of strategic verbal rehearsal at around 7 years of age is widely considered a major milestone in descriptions of the development of short-term memory across childhood. Likewise, rehearsal is believed by many to be a crucial factor in explaining why memory improves with age. This apparent qualitative shift in mnemonic processes has also been characterized as a shift from passive visual to more active verbal mnemonic strategy use, but no investigation of the development of overt spatial rehearsal has informed this explanation. We measured serial spatial order reconstruction in adults and groups of children 5-7 years old and 8-11 years old, while recording their eye movements. Children, particularly the youngest children, overtly fixated late-list spatial positions longer than adults, suggesting that younger children are less likely to engage in covert rehearsal during stimulus presentation than older children and adults. However, during retention the youngest children overtly fixated more of the to-be-remembered sequences than any other group, which is inconsistent with the idea that children do nothing to try to remember. Altogether, these data are inconsistent with the notion that children under 7 do not engage in any attempts to remember. They are most consistent with proposals that children's style of remembering shifts around age 7 from reactive cue-driven methods to proactive, covert methods, which may include cumulative rehearsal.
大约在 7 岁时，策略性言语复述的出现被广泛认为是儿童时期短期记忆发展描述中的一个主要里程碑。同样，许多人认为复述是解释为什么记忆随年龄增长而提高的关键因素。这种记忆过程的明显定性转变也被描述为从被动的视觉到更主动的言语记忆策略的使用的转变，但没有对显性空间复述的发展进行调查来解释这一转变。我们测量了成年人和 5-7 岁、8-11 岁儿童组的连续空间顺序重建，同时记录了他们的眼球运动。儿童，特别是最小的儿童，在呈现刺激时比成人更久地注视晚列表空间位置，这表明年幼的儿童在刺激呈现期间不太可能进行隐性复述，而年长的儿童和成人则更有可能进行隐性复述。然而，在保留期间，最小的儿童比任何其他组都更明显地注视着要记住的序列，这与儿童没有任何尝试去记忆的观点不一致。总的来说，这些数据与 7 岁以下的儿童没有任何试图记忆的观点不一致。它们最符合这样的观点，即儿童的记忆方式在 7 岁左右从反应性线索驱动的方法转变为主动的、隐性的方法，这可能包括累积复述。
