Developmental Effects of Grouping and Recoding on Learning a Movement Series

Abstract

Organization of information is a strategy used in verbal learning to improve task performance. Developmental trends exist for the use of an organization strategy; young children generally fail to use organizational cues when responding. With age, children use inherent organization followed by an increased ability to restructure input. This study focused on the developmental ability to use a cognitive strategy to recall a series of eight movements. Three conditions were used: experimenter presented organization (movements presented in order from short to long), training group (movements presented randomly with training to organize), and subjective organization (movements presented randomly). The ages selected were 5, 7, 11, and 19 years, since these ages tend to represent major changes in strategy usage. Learning trials were presented specifically for each group, while for transfer trials all subjects were given movements in an unorganized fashion. Results indicated that the younger children (5- and 7- year-olds) were unable to organize unstructured movements although 7-year-olds performed similarly to the 11-year-olds provided with experimenter organized movements. Unlike the 11- year-olds, the 7-year-olds were unable to transfer the strategy to a novel condition. Only adult subjects demonstrated the ability to organize the information. Conclusions suggested that the difference between adults and children in organization might be due to the children's lack of knowledge base and not due to an inherent inability to produce the strategy.