Attention and memory in children and adults in context-interactive and context-independent situations

The relation between attention to target and context information and target recall in an incidental learning task for children and adults was examined in seven experiments. In Experiment 1, second- and sixth-graders and college adults were presented with hard (e.g., hawk eagle canary), easy (river lake canary), or unrelated (river pencil canary) word triplets, varying in the difficulty of identifying the “odd” target word (canary), and were required to identify the target themselves (oddity choice), or such identification was optional, since the experimenter identified the target (read). Trial duration was either 3 or 7 s. The attentional patterns varied with triplet type, orienting activity, and trial duration. Most important, target and incidental context word recall seemed to vary directly with the extent of the interactive processing of context and target conceptual information, and the adults seemed more disposed to do such processing than the children. These results support a distinction between context-interactive and context-independent situations and suggest that the attentional patterns that are efficient for memory may differ with the kind of situation. The other experiments extend and establish the generality of these results.