Age and task effects in short-term memory of children

Children of 4, 8, and 14 years performed a visual memory task with easy- or hard-to-label displays and with or without repetition of stimuli over trials. Eight pictures were displayed in serial order, and the task was to find the card in the array that matched an identical probe card. Performance improved with age, and strong serial position effects were obtained for all ages and tasks. In contrast to previous studies, primacy effects were obtained for the youngest children tested. Task difficulty increased with difficulty of labeling and with repetition, but order of task difficulty remained the same for all ages. The d’ measure, borrowed from signal detection theory, revealed differences in criterion levels over serial position, which in earlier studies had been confounded with strength of memory.