Seeing, hearing, and doing: a developmental study of memory for actions.

The ability to recall and organize actions was studied in children from 5 to 11 years in age. 8 different auditory or visual commands were successively presented for 10 trials in each modality in a free-recall task. Younger children performed fewer commands but recalled relatively more recent ones, and they showed the same degree of subjective organization and the same degree and structure of hierarchical clustering as the older children. The hierarchical structure was independent of recall, age, and modality, with the motor actions being organized by the locus of the object or instrument of the verb in the command. The difficulty of the commands was highly correlated with uncertainty of the locus of the action, that is, the number of possible arguments (objects or instruments) a verb could assume, as measured by a subsidiary experiment on 8-year-olds who were asked to name as many parts of the body upon or with which one could perform each action. Developmental differences in recall appear to rise because of primary organization (retrieval) and rehearsal strategies rather than secondary organization.