Memory Binding in Early Childhood: Evidence for a Retrieval Deficit

• Published in: Child Development Vol. 80; no. 5; pp. 1321 - 1328
• Main Authors: Lloyd, Marianne E., Doydum, Ayzit O., Newcombe, Nora S.
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.09.2009; Wiley-Blackwell
• Subjects: Age Factors; Alarms; Biological and medical sciences; Child; Child Development; Child health; Child, Preschool; Children; Cognition; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive Ability; Cognitive development; Developmental psychology; Empirical Report; Encoding; False alarms; Family studies; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Legal objections; Long Term Memory; Male; Memory; Memory binding; Memory Disorders - psychology; Memory encoding; Memory recall; Older adults; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Recall; Recognition (Psychology); Retrieval; School age children; Scores; Short Term Memory; Studies; Task Analysis; Task performance; Task Performance and Analysis; Young Children; Human; Preschool age; Memory retrieval; Information integration; Memory; Cognition; Cognitive development; Child
• ISSN: 0009-3920; 1467-8624
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01353.x

Previous research has suggested that performance for items requiring memory-binding processes improves between ages 4 and 6 (J. Sluzenski, N. Newcombe, & S. L. Kovacs, 2006). The present study suggests that much of this improvement is due to retrieval, as opposed to encoding, deficits for 4-year-olds. Four- and 6-year-old children (N = 48 per age) were given objects, backgrounds, and object + background combinations to remember. Younger children performed equivalently to 6-year-olds during a working memory task for all types of memory questions but were impaired during a long-term memory task for the object + background combinations. Furthermore, this deficit was completely due to differences in false alarm rates, suggesting that separate analyses of hits and false alarms may be preferable to corrected recognition scores when studying memory development.