The effects of specific and categorical orienting on children's incidental and intentional memory for pictures and words

This study examines the effects of differences in the encoding of specific and categorical information on second graders' (7 years; 7 months), fifth graders' (10; 6), and college adults' cued recall for cue-target picture and word pairs. The cues at retrieval were either same-modal (P-P and W-W) or cross-modal (P-W and W-P) as the cues presented in acquisition, and acquisition encoding was either incidental or intentional and constrained by orienting questions or unconstrained. The most important results were that both picture and word recall varied with the encoding of both specific and categorical information and that children differed from adults in the encoding of both kinds of information in both incidental and intentional encoding conditions. In addition, both children and adults showed congruency effects for pictures and words that were greater for specific than for categorical orienting questions. The results suggest that differences in the encoding of both specific and categorical attribute information contribute to developmental recall differences independently of encoding intent and stimulus modality.