Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology [1 ed.] 9780816664016, 9780816607914

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MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, VOLUME 10

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MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Volume 10

ANNE D. PICK, EDITOR

THE U N I V E R S I T Y OF M I N N E S O T A P R E S S • M I N N E A P O L I S

Copyright © 1976 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America at the North Central Publishing Company, St. Paul

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-30520 ISBN 0-8166-0791-5

PUBLISHED IN CANADA BY BURNS & MAC EACHERN LIMITED, DON MILLS, ONTARIO

Preface

THE Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology are held each year at the University of Minnesota. For these events, six leading scholars are invited to present their programs of research on topics that are important for understanding human development. The 1975 symposium was the tenth such event, and it coincided with the occasion of the 50th year since the founding of the Institute of Child Development which hosts the symposium. That tenth symposium was a fitting celebration for the occasion; the publication in this volume of the papers from that symposium makes these important contributions available to the larger community of students of development. The topics of the research programs presented at the tenth symposium reflect the diverse aspects of development currently being explored. Likewise the age range of the subjects of these research programs—from infants born prematurely to late adolescents to adults—reflects the fact that important new knowledge is being acquired about development across the entire life span. Also represented in these presentations is the variety of strategies currently being used to advance our understanding of developmental processes. The papers by Stephen Suomi and by Arthur Parmelee and Marian Sigman, for example, illustrate the value of studying development in nonhuman species when the relevant aspect of human development is not amenable to direct analysis. Other investigators, like Donald Baer and his colleagues, are studying behavior in the settings in which that behavior ordinarily occurs, or, like Edith Neimark, are selecting for analysis naturally occurring tasks v

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY rather than tasks especially designed for the laboratory. Still another strategy, illustrated in the work of Ann Brown and of Robert Selman, is to use theoretical models to guide the sequence of questions one asks in the laboratory and to provide a conceptual context in which to interpret findings.

Donald Baer has long been interested in a practical problem with social and developmental implications: the management and control of children's behavior in the classroom. In their paper, Baer and his colleagues Trudilee Rowbury and Elizabeth Goetz discuss the concept of the behavioral trap, and they present evidence that the concept is relevant for understanding such diverse activities of children as interacting with peers and building complex constructions with blocks. The important characteristic of a behavioral trap is that it ensure significant rates of relevant behaviors independent of explicit extrinsic reinforcement for those behaviors. In the case of peer interactions, the extent of children's interactions with peers initially was maintained by specific reinforcement from teachers, but eventually was independent of such reinforcement. Baer and his colleagues conclude with the suggestion that when behavior traps, which are present in most of our physical and social environments, are analyzed and understood, they may become valuable tools for teaching.

Ann Brown discusses children's understanding of the temporal order of events and how that understanding develops. She finds that children's concepts about time develop gradually rather than suddenly and that even very young preschool-age children show some understanding of temporal sequence under optimal conditions. For example, when a story is available for connecting a sequence of events, young preschool-age children can easily reconstruct the order of those events either in forward or in reversed order. However, without the story, such children can only easily reconstruct the order of events in the order in which those events actually occurred. Brown's presentation of her research program illustrates both the sequential process by which we acquire new knowledge about development and the developmental details of children's understanding of sequences.

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PREFACE All schoolchildren and many adults are occasionally called on to memorize material so that subsequently it can be recalled verbatim. Edith Neimark is investigating how people go about memorizing and whether there is a developmental course to memorizing activities. She asked students ranging in age from about 9 years to 17 years and adults to memorize material such as pictures and words. She observed directly the strategies and activities that the students used and she also interviewed the students to verify or disconfirm her direct observations. She found that both age and ability are related to the use of study strategies, and she suggests that memory is not separable from intelligence but instead is one facet of it.

Understanding the developmental course of infants born prematurely is a topic that has obvious and far-reaching practical as well as theoretical importance. Arthur Parmelee and Marian Sigman are acquiring important new knowledge about the visual and neurological development of such infants by systematically comparing them with full-term infants of the same conceptional age. Generally, visual functioning is much more similar among infants of the same conceptional age than among infants of the same age from birth, suggesting that infants born prematurely do not profit from their more extensive visual experience than that of infants carried in utero until term. Parmelee and Sigman conclude that neurological organization and development are primarily responsible for the development of visual functioning during the early months of life. They are attempting to specify the nature of the relation among neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, and visual development by describing such development in kittens and by comparing their development with that of human infants, based on the relevant similarities of the two species.

A much later phase of human development than early infancy is considered by Robert Selman. He is studying the development of children's ideas about interpersonal relationships—especially during middle childhood and early adolescence. He first presents a model describing stages in the development of interpersonal concepts. Guided by this model, he then studies the nature and development of some specific types of interpersonal concepts, for example, children's reasoning about friendships with peers. Selman interviewed and questioned young boys about their ideas about friendships, and vii

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY he also observed systematic differences in the reasoning about peer relations that characterized boys diagnosed as having disturbed peer relations and boys not so diagnosed. Selman suggests that the development of social reasoning is orderly and sequential, and that it partly depends on the development of reasoning about the physical world.

The early infant-mother relationship has long been presumed crucial for the later social development of the young of many species. Stephen Suomi is studying the course of that relationship in young rhesus monkeys and their mothers, and how their relationship is affected by the social rearing environment. He finds that mothers' behavior toward their young infants is remarkably similar in social living environments that vary greatly in the extent to which the infants have access to other adults and peers with whom to interact. However, the infants' behavior toward their mothers varies greatly in these different social living settings. Suomi's observations suggest that the young of a species rather than their mothers may be more responsible for developmental changes in the infant-mother relationships than has been previously presumed.

Financial support for this tenth symposium was provided by a Public Health Service grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-01765), and by the Institute of Child Development. Many persons shared in preparing for this symposium and its publication; among them are Judith Allen, Helen Dickison, Virginia Eaton, Robert Gordon, Fred Gove, Melynda Mason, Richard Omanson, and the staff of the University of Minnesota Press. I am grateful for the help of all of these persons and especially for that of Judith Allen who has taken major responsibility for all phases of the symposium. John P. Hill, now at Cornell University, was the Editor of the first five volumes of the Minnesota Symposium series. I have been privileged to have had that responsibility for the second five volumes, and I have been assisted greatly by my colleagues on the faculty of the Institute of Child Development. I appreciate their counsel, and I am pleased that one of my associates on that faculty, W. Andrew Collins, will assume the Editorship for the next five volumes in the series. viii

PREFACE By far the largest measure of credit for the success of this symposium, and for the continuing influence of the Minnesota Symposia series on scholars in the field, belongs to the contributors themselves. These persons are taking the lead in the exciting and difficult quest to comprehend human development. It is to them, most of all, that I am grateful for the opportunity to have shared in conceiving and producing these volumes. ANNE D. PICK Minneapolis, Minnesota June, 1976

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Table of Contents

Behavioral Traps in the Preschool: A Proposal for Research BY DONALD M. BAER, TRUDILEE G. ROWBURY, AND ELIZABETH M. GOETZ

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The Construction of Temporal Succession by Preoperational Children BY ANN L. BROWN

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The Natural History of Spontaneous Mnemonic Activities under Conditions of Minimal Experimental Constraint BY EDITH D. NEIMARK

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Development of Visual Behavior and Neurological Organization in PreTerm and Full-Term Infants BY ARTHUR H. PARMELEE, JR. AND MARIAN SIGMAN

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Toward a Structural Analysis of Developing Interpersonal Relations Concepts: Research with Normal and Disturbed Preadolescent Boys BY ROBERT L. SELMAN

156

Mechanisms Underlying Social Development: A Reexamination of Mother-Infant Interactions in Monkeys BY STEPHEN J. SUOMI

201

List of Contributors

231

Index

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MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, VOLUME 10

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D O N A L D M. B A E R , T R U D I L E E G. R O W B U R Y , n AND E L I Z A B E T H M. G O E T Z

Behavioral Traps in the Preschool: A Proposal for Research

A TRAP is commonly known as a device for catching an animal rather than for catching a behavior. But this is only an oversight in popular usage: behaviors can be trapped; some behaviors need trapping; and the analysis of the psychological environment as a collection of behavioral traps may yield considerable profit to education, therapy, and behavior theory. Most of us have a suitably pragmatic view of one basic trap, namely the mousetrap. We rarely consider the mousetrap from a behavioral point of view, yet we use it essentially for behavior modification. It is not the existence of house mice which moves us to action; it is their behavior. They rustle and squeak at inopportune times, eat our groceries, defecate on our living space, and harbor small parasites/Thus house mice represent a problem in multiple behavior modification: noise, thievery, toilet training, and personal grooming. Each of these four behavior classes has been dealt with separately in school children, retardates, and juvenile delinquents, typically by the application of reinforcement contingencies to the desired behavior with concurrent extinction or mild punishment for any undesirable counterparts. A similar application of suitable contingencies to the house mouse is not beyond conception; it is merely impractical. Logistics suggest that we can hardly be present at those moments when the undesirable mouse responses occur; thus we cannot personally apply contingencies. Instrumented contingencies might be applied by machines that would selectively detect and react to mouse noises, their eating of our groceries, their defecation, and their nonapplication of flea 3

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY powder. However, the technological development of these machines is not being pursued, and in consequence, the modification of only four mouse-behavior classes remains a technically difficult problem. The classic solution has been, paradoxically, behavior modification on an even larger scale: all of the mouse's repertoire is suppressed to zero level. This is accomplished by killing it. However, killing a mouse is no simple feat for a human. Strength favors us, but agility favors the mouse. It is a rare person who will wait patiently outside a mouse hole until the mouse appears and an even rarer one who can catch the mouse before it escapes. Even then, it would take remarkably high arrogance and unusually low squeamishness to accomplish the forceful behavior required next. Most of us are not suitably trained for such a performance. In recognition of our inadequacy, we turn to the mousetrap. The mousetrap embodies most of the critical behaviors we lack. It will wait, poised for action, indefinitely. Its coordination and reflexes are lightning fast, almost always faster than those of the mouse. Its arrogance is limited only by the tensile qualities of the wire of which it is made, and no hint of squeamishness ever disturbs the precise, uniform lunge of its spring. Indeed, the only two failures of the trap are its original lack of attractiveness for mice and its immobility. But we can readily compensate for these inadequacies with commonplace human skills. We merely endow the trap with a bit of cheese to make it attractive to mice, and we intelligently locate it, cheese-adorned, where a mouse is likely to smell the cheese. If we can do these simple things, we can modify mouse behavior with unchanging reliability. Without a trap, however, we are forced either to develop the formidable skills listed above or to tolerate the mice, unmodified.* The essence of a trap, in behavioral terms, is that it allows many behavioral results from little behavioral control. In trapping the mouse, the only behavior control required is to have the mouse smell the cheese. From that point on, everything is almost automatic, and complete modification of the mouse's behavior will result. A human with no cheese and no trap has slight control of the mouse's behavior; a human with cheese but no trap has modest control; and a human with both cheese and a trap has massive control. *Alternatively, we may recruit a cat with the skills needed for the reliable killing of mice. However, a cat also requires much the same behavior modifications that constitute the total problem with mice. Of course, because cats live closely with humans, personally administered contingencies may be applied to quiet and toilet train them and to allow only infrequent thievery. Their availability also allows direct application of flea powder. Thus the required behavior modifications are more practical with the cat than with the mouse, and the cat is often used as a software version of a mousetrap. 4

DONALD M. BAER Advisers of college students frequently find themselves in a similar situation. Most students' behavior is controlled by the list in the college catalog of requirements for graduation, yet often the post-college future is completely unsettled. Advisers have only slight control of the students' behavior: at best, they may be able to cajole students into taking one elective rather than another. On the face of it, that is not sufficient control to determine the rest of the students' lives. But some advisers know that particular teachers of particular electives are extraordinarily effective. These teachers are likely to elicit considerable enthusiastic effort from students who previously have been stylishly or actually bored by their education. This effort can lead the students to facts and possibilities that in turn can maintain the students' excitement and work rates. Thus the students become trapped—decisions about their paths of future study emerge, which lead to a sequence of preparatory work for later professional involvement. The result is that few alternatives to do anything else but that professional work are left. Thus advisers may consider any such course a trap: a small amount of control over the studencs' choice of an elective may produce, with some reliability, eventual professional behavior that the advisers alone could never have produced. Yet the advisers functionally determined that such behavior would be produced, and it need not have been an accidental determination. That the course is a trap is neither the advisers' fault nor is it to their credit. If the course is selected accidentally, without appreciation for its potential as a behavioral trap, the advisers may disclaim any moral responsibility for the results of the trapping. But just as ignorance of the laws of a state is no excuse for breaking them, perhaps ignorance of the laws of behavior is no excuse for an unwitting application of them and the inevitable results. Advisers should know the traps that exist among academic course offerings. Armed with such knowledge, they may alert students to the possible consequences of taking these courses. The advisers may recommend these courses to students, or they may counsel against them. They may recommend disarming the traps, either by eliminating them from the curriculum or by denouncing the teaching, so that the students are no longer brought into contact with any reinforcers potent enough to maintain further behavior in that field. All but the first of these decisions seem absurdly paternalistic or destructive—and the first, despite its ring of fair play, may in fact serve only to guarantee that most students take any elective so characterized. Nevertheless, advisers who are sophisticated about the behavioral traps within the academic curriculum are more to be desired than advisers who are ignorant of them, although the latter may be happier in their jobs. 5

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Some traps are obvious. Alcohol, drugs, and marriage are familiar examples of initially slight behavior control accomplishing an entry response to an environment that then maintains and extends that control, developing in the process far more behavior than the entry response itself. The language community is another obvious example of a behavioral trap, the entry response to which is accomplished in early childhood by very casual and unsophisticated contingencies programmed primarily by parents. Within that community, teaching children to read is perhaps the classic example of a relatively trivial entry response that may expose them subsequently to the widest possible range and diversity of environments, any of which can bring about extraordinary changes in their behavioral repertoire. The entry response may seem unimpressive—first-grade activities applied to no more than Dick, Jane and Spot—but the environment of print probably does more than any other to accomplish behavior change in the realms of politics, professions, recreation, and social intercourse, for those who can enter it—or who already have. These examples should not only establish that the concept of a behavioral trap is a familiar one but in addition should demonstrate that many traps are benevolent, resembling the mousetrap only in principle and not in connotation or goal. Of all the traps imaginable, perhaps the most useful ones—like reading—are located within the educational system. Recognition that such traps can exist, and that at least a few certainly do, should urgently recommend the detection of all further traps that may yet be lurking within our typical instructional techniques. If we know what the traps are, we may indeed wish to dismantle some, or at least prevent their entry responses. Some others we may wish to enter with all speed, the earlier the better. Consequently, it seems reasonable to examine the preschool as a possible locale of behavioral traps. Two possibilities may be identified at the outset. The first is in the peer group, the second in the school's play media. Peer Traps. The typical preschool classroom contains a dozen or more young children, assembled on the basis of age and roughly equivalent in skills and interests. The preschool is probably for most of them the most concentrated exposure they have yet had to an assemblage of peers and near-peers. True, some come from large families affording them experience with siblings. But these siblings usually are either older or younger and thus typically have dominated or submitted to the preschool child. Thus it is the preschool that first allows for intensive and frequent social interaction with peers, and combined patterns of leadership and submission to leadership are very much to be 6

DONALD M. BAER expected and are usually desirable. If such patterns develop, they are likely to bring the children into contact with the wealth of social and other reinforcers provided by peer interaction. To the extent that these new reinforcers are potent for preschoolers, they may represent a community of reinforcement contingencies for maintaining and elaborating their behavior. A teacher who can control children's behavior sufficiently to bring them into contact with this community of reinforcement contingencies may trap the children into the continuing control typical of such communities. The community, without planning it, will extend the children's repertoires in many directions: motor skills, daring, language, games (and their corresponding rules), boy-girl differences and nondifferences, and the generalities of social give-and-take. The teachers themselves might attempt these changes, but it would be an unusually ambitious undertaking. It is doubtful that teachers have enough control over each child's behavior, enough hours to give to each child's systematic reinforcement, or access to programs designed to shape the specified behaviors in an appropriate sequence. For the peer group, by contrast, it is (literally) child's play. Thus, teachers need do no more than introduce children to peers and insure that interaction occurs. Demonstration of a peer behavior trap is provided in the master's thesis of Ellen Ingram (1967). Ingram's task was to remediate a common preschool child behavior problem—social isolation within the preschool classroom. She demonstrated that peer interaction could be measured objectively and sensitively in the classroom, and she devised and applied social reinforcement contingencies in order to convince a properly skeptical audience that the remediation was not only complete but was understood and repeatable. The child's peer-interaction rate was measured through continuous time-sampling every 10 seconds of the free-play period of each preschool session. The percentage of each period's 10-second intervals during which the child displayed peer interaction was taken as a daily measure of his problem. This averaged only about 4 percent during four initial blocks of observation (comprising several weeks of the preschool years). Then, for several weeks, Ingram and her coteachers applied systematic social reinforcement contingencies to all observed instances of peer interaction: whenever peer interaction occurred, the teachers attended to the interaction, displayed interest and delight, and provided suggestions and materials for extending the current play. Otherwise, they attended to the isolated child very little. Associated with this technique, they observed a sudden increase in the child's peer-interaction rate to a new average of about 17 percent. In order to analyze that increase experimentally, they 7

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY discontinued their systematic reinforcement techniques and substituted unsystematic, intermittent attention to all varieties of the child's behavior. The peer-interaction level declined within a few days to 10 percent. Reinforcement was resumed for another block of preschool sessions, and again peer interaction increased, this time to a 30 percent level. Systematic reinforcement was again discontinued, and there was some decline in interaction to a 17 percent average, which was stable over several sessions. Resumption of reinforcement led to a modestly higher (and thoroughly satisfactory) level of 23 percent. Discontinuation of that reinforcement resulted in very slight loss (to a 20 percent level). Another application of reinforcement produced a 24 percent average. Final discontinuation of systematic reinforcement did not result in any loss: a stable level of 23 percent was maintained. This pattern of results is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Interaction by a preschool boy with peers during blocks of noncontingent reinforcement (white bars) and reinforcement contingent on peer interaction (shaded bars). Data are from Ingram (1967).

A similar, but considerably faster change was reported by Ruth Sparks (1968). Using the same techniques of social reinforcement of the peer interaction of a similarly isolated child, Sparks and her co-teachers produced the same results: there were quick upward shifts toward a 25 percent level of peer interaction (from a stable baseline level of about 8 percent) each time reinforcement was applied. These high levels of peer interaction were immediate8

Figure 2. Interaction by a preschool boy with peers during conditions of noncontingent reinforcement (white bars) and reinforcement contingent on peer interaction (shaded bars). Each bar represents a day of the study. Data are from Sparks (1968).

ly lost with each of the first two discontinuations of systematic teacher reinforcement. But high levels of peer interaction were finally maintained, starting from the third time teacher reinforcement was discontinued, and were seen thereafter even in postchecks months later. These results are shown in Figure 2, not as averages of blocks of sessions, but as daily percentages. The parallel to Ingram's data is clear (but is seen over spans of days, rather than over lengthy blocks of days). That is, in both studies experimental control is lost after it has been demonstrated clearly. In different terms, it is shown in both studies that peer interaction initially was a behavior maintained by teacher reinforcement but subsequently became independent of that reinforcement, perhaps being maintained by other consequences. The most obvious other consequences are those supplied by the child's peers in the course of peer interaction. Alternately, peer interaction may be a behavior that requires consequences other than those endemic to it only for its early development and maintenance, and becomes independent of these after some time. Either peer interaction is a behavior with special characteristics (eventual independence of reinforcement) or it is eventually maintained by consequences such as peer reactions during peer interaction. If the logical choices are be9

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY tween identifying some behaviors as "special" and attributing functional social reinforcement to a child's peer group, parsimony favors the latter. Recognition of the peer group as a trap has changed the practices of some preschool teachers who use deliberate behavior-modification techniques. Because entrapment within the peer group can have such extensive and far-reaching results, some teachers prefer to stop short of such entrapment. On the other hand, teachers usually agree that it is important for children to possess the basic skills of positive social interaction with their peers, as well as with adults. Consequently, some programs for the deliberate development of peer interaction maintain systematic teacher reinforcement only until a desirable level of peer interaction has occurred and then discontinue reinforcement, usually before the behavior class has become totally independent of teacher reinforcement. Such programs ensure that children possess adequate skills of peer interaction, but they do not guarantee that these skills will be used at a high rate every day. Much is left to the children's environment; it is assumed that if the skills prove valuable in the future, the necessary behaviors exist within the children's repertoires. Media Traps. If social traps occur in preschools, so also may nonsocial traps. In particular, some preschool curriculum materials or media may themselves constitute small traps. In this context, a trap is any material, activity, or medium that eventually will maintain appreciable rates of child behavior with it, independent of any extrinsic reinforcement. The importance of such a trap for early childhood education depends on at least two characteristics: Does the trap maintain so much child behavior that other activities of the child are diminished through competition? Does the trap foster additional behaviors or skills through the child's continuing interaction with it? For example, there are collections of blocks in every preschool, and block building is encouraged. This encouragement is unnecessary for most children —blocks already command much behavior from preschoolers. However, some children do not build with blocks, and unless deliberate remediation occurs, these children may fail to block build throughout their preschool years. If extrinsic reinforcement were programmed to shape and maintain block-building rates in these children, would those rates eventually become independent of the extrinsic reinforcement? And if so, does the maintenance of block-building behavior profit the children in any way? In particular, does their continued block building teach them more diverse ways of using blocks and/or other building materials? No data are available to answer these questions. Nevertheless, many pre10

DONALD M. BAER school teaching techniques are predicated on the assumption that the materials provided in the preschool have intrinsic instructional value for the child and do not merely consume time. Consequently, these materials should be investigated both as potential traps and as potential teaching devices. A beginning of such an investigation is reported here. Blocks were chosen for systematic research for several reasons. Blocks are nearly universal preschool materials. They are widely believed to be valuable, containing basic lessons in space, mass, leverage, gravity, measurement, and aesthetics, and are considered useful in encouraging fantasy play (as enclosures, garages, shops, forts, homes, corrals, towers, etc.). Further, they are three-dimensional physical objects, easy to observe and relatively easy to describe as structures. Finally, they may be typical of other preschool materials. Thus what is true of play with blocks could well have its analogue in play with clay, dolls, paints, collages, puzzles, and the like. Several techniques for recording block-building behavior have been explored. Behaviors such as block placement, block replacement, and pauses can be recorded in the sequence in which they occur. However, very nearly the same information, except for sequence, can be obtained by allowing the child to finish a block construction and then photographing the construction from a variety of angles (before the child knocks it down, which is a fairly probable event). A Polaroid camera is particularly useful because it allows the recorder to know whether an adequate set of photographs has been collected before the structure is destroyed. From these photographs, observers may count the number of blocks in the construction and the number of different forms constructed. The teacher conducting each block-building session can time it with a stopwatch, from the placing of the first block to the child's signal that play is finished. These three scores (number of blocks used, time spent building, number of different block forms constructed) allow for at least preliminary experimental analyses of blockbuilding as a behavior susceptible to entrapment and elaboration. Two observers may examine the photographs of each construction independently of one another, and their scores of number of blocks and number of different block forms can be compared, either by correlation over a series of constructions or by tabulating how often they disagree. The latter analysis, though severe, has yielded better than 95 percent observer agreement, primarily because the study of several photographs of each construction allows for very leisurely, accurate, and careful scoring. The scores of time and of number of blocks are self-explanatory. However, the forms score (number of different block forms constructed by the child) 11

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA O N C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y

Figure 3. Examples of block-building forms.

may be defined differently for different research purposes. Some 20 forms of block building were defined, based on earlier observations of block-building constructions in the preschool where the research was to be conducted. Fourteen examples of such forms are illustrated in Figure 3. (A complete list of forms is given in Goetz & Baer, 1973, p. 211.) Thus "fence" was defined as any two (or more) blocks placed side by side to accomplish lateral extension, 12

D O N A L D M. BAER "story" was defined as any two (or more) placed one atop the other to accomplish vertical extension, etc. Obviously, such definitions are arbitrary. Nevertheless they serve to categorize frequently encountered block arrangements made by preschool children; they are aprima facie measure of the complexity of those arrangements; and they are usually interesting to block-building enthusiasts. When these measures and observation techniques were established, three children were chosen for intensive study. One, given the pseudonym "Saul," was chosen because he used blocks infrequently during the first months of his preschool year. When he did build with blocks, his constructions were quite rudimentary. Two other children, "Tim" and "Mark," were chosen as comparison cases: both built with blocks frequently and both were considered skilled block builders. The basic experimental design was quite simple. Each child was recruited for a 20-minute block-building session every few days. During the sessions, he and a teacher occupied an isolated corner of the preschool classroom, while the other children played outdoors. The teacher was constantly attentive to the child's block building, watching intently as each block was placed. In one session of every three, beginning with the first session and continuing regularly thereafter, the teacher offered intensive social reinforcement for the placing of each block, by commenting on it in a delighted, interested, or complimentary way, and smiling and nodding. During the other two sessions of each trio, she watched in silence. Sessions were to last no longer than 20 minutes, but in fact they always ended before 20 minutes had elapsed. A session ended when the child announced that he was done. If he had not placed a block for approximately half a minute, the teacher asked him if he was done and accepted whatever answer he offered. Figures 4 and 5 illustrate the effects of teacher reinforcement of block placing on time and number of blocks used, respectively. It is apparent that both Tim (a skilled block builder) and Saul (the naive block builder) were responsive to teacher reinforcement, spending more time and using more blocks when each placement was reinforced than when it was not. Mark, by contrast, showed little if any responsiveness to the reinforcement. All three children showed satiation as the sessions proceeded, spending less time and placing fewer blocks in the course of successive sessions. For Mark, an accidental event exerted more control of his block building than did the experimentally programmed reinforcement. On four occasions, a friend of his asked to watch him build, and the friend was allowed to be present as a silent but attentive 13

Figure 4. The amount of time spent placing blocks by three subjects during daily sessions of the study. Shaded bars represent a condition of reinforcement of block placement; white bars represent nonreinforcement. In the small figure appearing above Mark's graph, the same data are replotted according to the absence (white bars) or presence (shaded bars) of a peer watching Mark's block building. audience. On these four occasions, Mark's time and number-of-blocks scores were high relative to his scores during all other sessions. This effect is illustrated in the small figure inserted above Mark's graphs in Figures 4 and 5 (the relevant sessions are shaded and coded peer).

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Figure 5. The number of blocks placed by three subjects during daily sessions of the study. Shaded bars represent a condition of reinforcement of block placement; white bars represent nonreinf or cement. In the small figure appearing above Mark's graph, the same data are replotted according to the absence (white bars) or presence (shaded bars) of a peer watching Mark's block building.

Inspection of Figures 4 and 5 shows that whether control was exerted by systematic teacher reinforcement or by an accidental peer audience, there was no evidence of an inherent trap in block building. Neither time nor number-ofblocks scores showed any changes independent of reinforcement during the 15

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY study. However, time and number-of-blocks scores are very simple measures that take no account of the content of the children's block building. Two rough indexes of that aspect of block behavior are shown in Figures 6 and 7.* Form diversity, defined as the number of different forms seen (at least once) in each construction, is shown in Figure 6. Each form evident was given a score of 1, whether it was present once or in many repetitions; these unit scores were then summed to yield the form-diversity score for each construction. Figure 7 shows form density, defined as the number of different forms contained in each construction (each scored only once, whether present once or many times per construction) divided by the number of blocks used in that construction. Thus form density is a rate measure: a form-density score of 1.0 implies one form accomplished per block used, a score of 0.1 implies one form accomplished per ten blocks used, etc. An inspection of Figure 6 shows that form diversity was not a function of teacher reinforcement for the two skilled children, Tim and Mark; Tim's form diversity declined fairly steadily over sessions, and Mark's varied as widely during unreinforced sessions as during reinforced ones (and also showed some decline in the final sessions). However, Saul, the naive block builder, showed a marked sensitivity to teacher reinforcement. His form diversity had been quite low at the outset, compared with that of the two skilled children. Teacher reinforcement of Saul's block placements produced a threefold increase in form-diversity scores. At first, this increased diversity depended on teacher reinforcement, occurring only during sessions when block placement was reinforced. Later, however, an "entrapment" pattern emerged: form diversity during unreinforced sessions increased nearly to the level characteristic of reinforced sessions. Thus it might be suggested by Figure 6 that blocks can be a behavioral trap, teaching form diversity to a child who interacts with them long enough, and finally producing that diversity independent of the original reinforcement. However, a comparison of Figure 6 with Figure 5 (number of blocks used per construction) shows that Saul increased his number of blocks initially in almost the same pattern as he increased his form diversity. Thus the increased number of forms he displayed in each construction "Tim's data had been gathered by an observer, and photographs of his constructions were taken as frequent samples, rather than after every session. In fact, one of every two unreinforced sessions went unphotographed as well as unreinforced. The form scores, which depended on photographs for accurate scoring (since Tim invariably knocked down his block construction promptly after finishing it) thus were available for all of the reinforced and only half of the unreinforced sessions. Figures 6 and 7 accordingly do not show two unreinforced sessions for each reinforced session, but only one, the one for which these data were available in accurate form.

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Figure 6. The form diversity (number of different forms) of three subjects' constructions during daily sessions of the study. Shaded bars represent a condition of reinforcement of block placement; white bars represent nonreinforcement.The P's appearing above certain bars in Mark's graph represent the four sessions when a peer watched his block building. during reinforced sessions may be attributed simply to the fact that he was placing many more blocks than usual during those sessions and hence was quite likely to accomplish more forms. The form-density score displayed in Figure 7 allows a firmer and more in-

17

Figure 7. The form density (number of different forms divided by number of blocks used) of three subjects' constructions during daily sessions of the study. Shaded bars represent a condition of reinforcement of block placement; white bars represent nonreinforcement. The P's appearing above certain bars in Mark's graph represent the four sessions when a peer watched his block building.

18

DONALD M. BAER teresting conclusion. Increases in form density are independent of the number of blocks used, since each form-density score is expressed as a ratio of the number of different forms to the number of blocks used. Saul's form-density score was initially lower than the scores of Tim and Mark, but Saul's score increased steadily across his reinforced and unreinforced sessions. Furthermore, it will be noted that the form-density scores of skilled block builders typically were higher when they were not being reinforced for block placement than when they were. In fact, reinforcement produced a considerable repetition of forms in their constructions, thereby lowering their form-density scores. As Saul underwent successive sessions of reinforcement (which, according to Figures 4 through 6, were functional for him), his pattern of form-density scores closely approached the pattern of the two skilled block-builders. Thus by the end of his training he showed quite high form-density scores and responded to direct reinforcement by repeating forms, rather than by always displaying different ones. In this instance, "entrapment" may fairly be claimed: repeated maintenance of block building in a previously unskilled child yielded a durably higher probability of different forms and this high probability was maintained and intensified in the absence of the reinforcement originally necessary to produce the high rates of block-building behavior. If form density is considered a desirable attribute of block building, then the trap was a benevolent one. Thus Saul finally played with blocks in a more complex way than previously and apparently needed no teacher reinforcement to maintain that complexity. Form diversity may or may not be immediately appreciated as a valuable outcome in children's behavior. The law of large numbers suggests that it could well be a valuable goal. If many different forms are produced in a given construction, then two interesting outcomes are possible: 1. The chances of making more and significant combinations of forms to constitute yet more complex forms are increased. This assumes that there are useful lessons to learn from block manipulation and that at least some of those lessons are implicit in the ways in which blocks can be combined into structures. Some of those structures may be instructive or pleasing in their own right, but this cannot happen until the structures are encountered. The presence of many different forms encourages such encounters, by accident at least, even if by no more deliberate or systematic means. 2. If a child is systematically producing more and more different forms per construction, then perhaps the child will be impelled to invent new forms, as the old repertoire is exhausted. Invention is very widely valued both as a skill and for at least some of its results. 19

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Perhaps reinforcement could be directed toward the systematic, direct production of form diversity rather than toward form diversity as an indirect outcome of reinforcement aimed at placing blocks anywhere. Three more children were chosen for a study of a more explicit reinforcement contingency. All three were girls who were deficient in block building. Kathy and Mary were very deficient in the form content of their daily block constructions— they simply laid out the blocks in groups of like-shaped types or sizes. Sally, by contrast, built a structure fairly rich in forms, but unfortunately she built virtually the same structure (a castle) every day. Thus, each child could profit from the more specialized contingency to be applied. The contingency was conceptualized as reinforcement for form diversity. Since form diversity is an abstraction derived from the ways in which children use blocks, it might seem difficult to place a contingency on it. The contingency was as follows: the child's first creation of any recognized form in a day's construction would be reinforced by the teacher's delighted interest. But the second, third, fourth, and all later instances of that form in the day's construction would be ignored. Furthermore, the teacher's reinforcement would be of the sort called descriptive: it would specify that the teacher was delighted because the response just made was different from previous responses ("Oh, that's very nice—that's different." and "I like that. You haven't done that before!"). In short, the teacher reinforced any form on its first appearance on a given day but not thereafter during that day. The next day the teacher "forgot" what forms had been used the day before and began afresh. Thus teacher reinforcement was given for an abstraction called form diversity. Reinforcement of a form depended not on the form itself, but on whether that particular form was occurring for the first time that day—that is, on whether it was different from all other forms already present in the day's construction. In this sense, the teacher did not choose what to reinforce but only what not to reinforce; a response reinforceable at one moment would cease to be reinforceable thereafter, because it would then be a repetition. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the teacher did not teach the child how to be form diverse; there were no suggestions about how to place one block relative to another. Teacher delight was restricted entirely to the outcome, leaving the child free to invent. The results of this contingency are apparent in Figure 8, in which the time course of form diversity for the three children is shown. The study was begun with a baseline, during which the teacher was merely attentive and did not react differentially to any particular form of block building. After the establishment of the baseline characteristic of each child, the teacher initiated the 20

Figure 8. The form diversity (number of different forms) of three subjects' constructions during daily sessions of the study. Daily scores marked n represent an unreinforced baseline condition; those marked D represent a condition of reinforcement of each different form displayed for the first time during that day's block building; and those marked S represent a condition of reinforcement of repetition of the same forms already displayed during that day's block building. reinforcement of form diversity. The results were a uniform increase in form diversity in each instance. These increases were substantial, as the figure shows, and they were very prompt, emerging in the course of one to four successive sessions of block building. An experimental analysis was accomplished

21

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA O N C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y by reversing the form-diversity contingency. During a brief condition (marked "S's" in Figure 8), teacher reinforcement was withheld when a form appeared for the first time in a day's construction but was then given for every repetition of that form thereafter in the day's construction. Again, the reinforcement was descriptive of its controlling dimension: the teacher expressed delight by saying such things as "Oh, good—another arch." or "Two posts! How nice!" This reversal of the contingency and its content had the predictable effect: all the children declined from their high levels of form diversity and began to repeat many forms. But form diversity, not form repetition, was the desired outcome, and so the experiment concluded with a return to the reinforcement of form diversity. In the final encounter with this reinforcement, the children recovered their previous high levels of form diversity, and in one instance (Kathy) yielded an even higher level. A related phenomenon was noticed as well: the children invented new forms while achieving the high levels of form diversity. A new form was one that had never been seen in any of the children's prior constructions. Across the three children, the rate of invention of new forms averaged 1.5 per session during the periods of reinforcement of form diversity; during the baseline period and the condition of reinforcement for repetition of forms, it averaged only 0.33 forms per session. Thus the children were five times as inventive under conditions of reinforcement for form diversity as under no-reinforcement or reinforcement-for-repetition conditions. (A more detailed account of this study has been presented by Goetz & Baer, 1973). In a prior discussion of this last study, the term "creativity" was cautiously invoked (Goetz & Baer, 1973, p. 216): If children build with blocks by systematically producing diverse forms and regularly inventing new forms (new to them, at least), then perhaps that block building can be considered creative. A survey of the literature dealing with the concept of creative child behaviors has been presented elsewhere (Holman, Goetz, & Baer, 1976), and the subject is too extensive to be reviewed here as well. The literature contains so vast an array of definitions of creativity that two conclusions seem reasonable: 1. So many conceptions of creativity have been advanced that there is no possibility of a new one (in other words, creativity within the field of creativity now seems impossible). 2. No definition can fail to be at serious variance with a large number of the definitions already occupying the field. Given these conclusions, two theses may be advanced: 1. Of the many conceptions of creativity available, a fair number incorpo22

DONALD M. BAER

Figure 9. An example of Mary's block-building constructions during the baseline condition of the study (see Figure 8).

Figure 10. Mary's block-building construction after the third session of reinforcement for form diversity (see Figure 8).

23

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY rate the idea of novelty, newness, or inventiveness of behavior, and that idea does seem to be at the core of the form-diversity and new-forms measures used in this study. 2. Whether or not form diversity and the invention of new forms reflect creative block building, they may nevertheless be valued as worthwhile in the curriculum of early childhood education. If so, note that the technique studied here is quick and effective. It does require considerable alertness and memory on the teacher's part (To look at a child's current block placement, categorize the form accomplished by the placement, discern whether that form has been produced previously in this session's block building, and program or withhold meaningful approval accordingly—all within the narrow temporal constraints of effective reinforcement—is not child's play.). Nevertheless, it can be done, and has been done, not only by experienced teachers

Figure 11. An example of Sally's block-building constructions during the baseline condition of the study (see Figure 8). 24

D O N A L D M. BAER

Figure 12. Sally's block-building construction in the fourth session of reinforcement for form diversity (see Figure 8).

but also by student-teachers of several recent training programs. An accuracy level of approximately 80 percent by the teacher is apparently more than sufficient. Furthermore, the technique leans on an ipsative criterion of invention. That is, it teaches children to invent forms that are new to them, rather than new to their teacher or to some hypothetical audience or standard. If a concept of inventiveness is to be taught, there would seem to be no better first lesson than to surpass one's own conceptions. Subsequent orientations to the surrounding society may then make easier the task of surpassing the societal conceptions as well. Perhaps it is fair to argue that formal schooling emphasizes not so much the student's inventions but rather the student's learning about all our past inventions (and conventions). If this is so, then it may well 25

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA O N C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y be that the preschool is the most convenient place and time in a child's life to present alternatives. Whether or not form diversity and the invention of new forms is indeed a valuable attainment by young children may well depend on what those forms look like to the eye of the beholder rather than on the meaning of the graphs displayed so far in this discussion. Because of that possibility, Figures 9, 10, 11, and 12 are offered for examination. Figure 9 shows a typical construction made by Mary during the baseline condition of her study. Mary was one of the children who typically laid out the blocks in like-shaped or like-sized piles but otherwise achieved little form content. Figure 10 shows her construction after the third session of reinforcement for form diversity. Figure 11 similarly displays a baseline construction made by Sally, whose block-building was not form-impoverished but simply too repetitive: the castle shown in the figure is virtually identical to all of her other baseline constructions. Figure 12 shows her construction in the fourth day of reinforcement for form diversity. Spectators no doubt will offer diverse opinions about the creativity or lack of creativity inherent in any of those structures. But if they represent worthwhile attainments by preschool children, then a curriculum to accomplish this is certainly within reach. A more interesting unsolved problem is the construction of a curriculum that would produce a thoroughly generalized ability to use any of the media of early childhood to construct diverse forms and to invent new ones. If such a curriculum is to be developed, then the preschool will contain one more trap for children's behaviors, and perhaps a very benevolent one. These results are a very small analysis of a potential curricular trap to be found in most preschools. Its generality across children and the durability of its effects across time remain to be seen. The existence of similar effects implicit in other curricular materials of the preschool is still largely unexamined. The long-term significance of these effects for the child is also unknown. Thus this report is essentially a proposal and a call for further research. But the point may be emphasized once more that traps are probably frequent and inevitable throughout our environments. Although they deserve the "trap" label, they do not always deserve the negative connotation that "trap" usually carries. Once known and evaluated, the "trap" may indeed come to be considered among our most valuable teaching tools. After all, this is essentially the same concept expounded by Kantor as "ecological behavior" (1933) and further postulated by Bijou and Baer (1961, 1965) as basic to much early development. 26

DONALD M. BAER References Bijou, S. W., & Baer, D. M. Child development. Volumes I and II. New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1961, 1965. Goetz, E. M., & Baer, D. M. Social control of form diversity and the emergence of new forms in children's block-building. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1973, 6, 209-217. Holman, J., Goetz, E. M., & Baer, D. M. The training of creativity as an operant and an examination of its generalization characteristics. In B. C. Etzel, J. M. LeBlanc, & D. M. Baer (Eds.), New developments in behavioral research: Theory, method, and application. In honor of Sidney W. Bijou. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976 (in press). Ingram, E. M. Discriminative and reinforcing functions in the experimental development of social behavior in a preschool child. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of Kansas, 1967. Kantor, J. R. A survey of the science of psychology. Bloomington, Indiana: Principia Press, 1933. Sparks, R. M. Durability of the effects of contingent teacher reinforcement of social interaction in a preschool child. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of Kansas, 1968.

27

n ANN

L. B R O W N n

The Construction of Temporal Succession by Preoperational Children

"Time is an invention or it is nothing at all." (Bergson, 1910) UNDERSTANDING time is an essential prerequisite for the development of scientific thought; yet there is considerable evidence that a mature conception of time is late in developing and, indeed, is fragile even in adults (Piaget, 1966, 1970a). Traditionally, the nature of time has been the subject of considerable philosophical speculation that cannot concern us here. From the viewpoint of a developmental psychologist, however, it is useful to distinguish between relativistic notions of time and more traditional theories, such as those of Kant (1934) and Descartes (1825). Within the framework of tradiNOTE: This research was supported by Grants HD 06864 and HD 05951 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The author would like to express her appreciation to Joseph C. Campione, Sallie Lawton, Lucia French, Jeanne Day, Craig Barclay, Blanche Bante, and Martin Murphy for their critical reading of parts of the manuscript and their collaboration in various stages of the research; to Peggy Davis and Janet Leveque for drawing stimulus materials; to Roberta Jones, Nedra Boyer, Cheryl Hahn, Peggy Davis, Jeanne Day, and Lexine Adelt for collecting data; and especially to Sallie Lawton for the many months spent slaving over a hot jungle and dealing with the capricious logic of children in the transitional period. Most of all we are grateful to the parents and teachers, and, of course, the children who participated so willingly, from the following Champaign-Urbana schools and summer programs: Carrie-Busey, Dr. Howard, Kenwood, Robeson, and Washington elementary schools, the Institute for Child Behavior and Development, First United Methodist Church, Happi-Time, Orchard Downs, and La Petite Academy nursery schools and day care centers, the YMCA summer day camps and the Champaign Park District summer programs.

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ANN L. B R O W N tional theories, time is seen as a necessary condition for our ability to experience the physical world and as such is an innate, a priori, notion embedded in the mind and independent of experience. Whereas time and space are simple notions, velocity is an abstraction since it is defined as a relation between time and space. But time can only be measured by accepting velocity, and we define velocity by reference to the passage of time—a vicious circle noted by Piaget (1966). From the point of view of relativistic theories, time is relative to velocity and derived from it; physical time is dependent on the coordination of velocities, and lived or internal time (Piaget, 1969) is dependent on the concomitant psychological content or activity (Bergson, 1911). Time is, therefore, an abstraction rather than a simple or direct perception. Far from being innate, time must be constructed by the child, and this process of construction takes—time. Despite Kant's speculations, there is ample evidence to indicate that the capacity to experience, estimate, and construct time is a gradually developing human characteristic. If we assume that the concept of time develops genetically in the course of individual and social experience, then an examination of the ontogenesis of concepts such as time should provide a fruitful source of information concerning both conceptual development and the nature of temporal concepts as part of scientific knowledge. Research in two major areas has been influential in the series of studies to be described here, studies emanating from Piaget's genetic epistemology approach and the not unrelated area of the production and comprehension of time language in children. It should be noted, however, that there is extensive literature concerning temporal knowledge in children outside of these specific frameworks. Consideration of this literature revealed that the area has been studied widely if not always wisely. With few exceptions, the majority of studies have been atheoretical in orientation and methodologically unsound. Indeed, a major portion of the developmental literature consists of anecdotal and questionnaire studies of dubious reliability and validity concerned with the child's growing awareness of clock and calendar time, the seasons, historical perspective, and temporal anomalies. The contribution of this literature to our research program has been disappointingly small. We shall consider various aspects of Piaget's theory throughout this chapter and, therefore, only a brief outline will be given here. According to Piaget (1966, 1969,1970a), understanding temporal concepts requires an intellectual construction on the part of the child, a construction based on operations that parallel those involved in other forms of logical reasoning. Not surprisingly, therefore, the developmental stages of the acquisition of temporal knowledge 29

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY are isomorphic with the stages of logical development in general, i.e., a perceptual stage, a stage of preoperational notions, and an operational stage. In order for the child to develop logical or operational conceptions of time he must acquire three basic rules. The first, sedation, is the ability to order events in terms of temporal succession, to understand that B comes after A, C comes after B, etc. The second is the classification of durations which demands operations similar to class inclusion; if B follows A and C follows B, then it must be that the time interval AC is longer than the time interval AB. The third operation, the measurement of time, demands that the order of succession and the classification of durations be coordinated. This final stage is reached when the child can conceive of time as a homogeneous and reversible concept, can distinguish between time, space, and velocity, and can coordinate succession and duration into a unified concept of time. As an initial stage in our program concerned with temporal knowledge, we decided to concentrate on the transition from preoperational to operational logic, not an uncommon focus of attention. Therefore, the first operation of the acquisition process was of particular interest. Piaget (1969) believes that the first operation, seriation of the order of events, provides the foundation for all subsequent operations. Although it is the first operation to emerge, it is truly a part of operational reasoning and therefore should play no part in prelogical thought. The ability to seriate events presupposes reversibility of thought and therefore the onset of operativity. The reconstruction of temporal succession necessarily involves the use of operations by which the events can be projected forward and backward in thought, since every series, however asymmetrical, must have two directions. Seriating two events is tantamount to establishing not only that A precedes B; B precedes C; etc., but also that C succeeds B; and B succeeds A. Now to do that, we must go back from the effects to the causes or proceed from the causes to the effects—it is in that sense that the order of succession presupposes reversibility of thought. (Piaget, 1969, pp. 273-274). Therefore, because of our interest in the transitional period between intuitive and operative reasoning we decided to begin our investigation with the operation of temporal seriation. Although the Piagetian model provided the main impetus to investigate simple sequentiality, other avenues of research also indicated this would be a fruitful point of departure. The ability to seriate a series of pictures into a logical sequence appears as an item on many standardized intelligence tests (age 5 subtest of the Stanford-Binet) and is a major component of reading30

ANN L. B R O W N readiness batteries. These tasks, therefore, are expected to fall within the cognitive competency of children below 6 years of age. If reversibility of thought is required in order to seriate pictures in temporal succession, children should not be able to perform adequately until approximately 7 years of age, as suggested by Piaget. This is an intriguing contradiction, made even more interesting by the observation of primitive seriation ability in very young children (Beilin, 1975; Greenfield, Nelson, & Saltzman, 1972). Another major influence on our choice of the sequencing task was the increasing amount of literature concerned with the acquisition of temporal reference as evidenced in spontaneous speech (E. V. Clark, 1970; Cromer, 1968) and in the ability to comprehend temporal constructions (Amidon & Carey, 1972; Ferreiro & Sinclair, 1971; French & Brown, 1975; Johnson, 1975; Keller-Cohen, 1974; Weil, 1970). Both the production of utterances in which the linguistic order does not preserve the real order in time and the use of complex constructions such as the present perfect tense emerge very late in the child's speech (Cromer, 1968). Such constructions demand that the child go from the present into the past and then back to the present, a form of reversibility analogous to that needed when "before" and "after" are used in sentences that violate the real order of time. There is evidence, although somewhat contradictory (Ferreiro & Sinclair, 1971), that the child's comprehension of "before" and "after" in both positions in a sentence is not competent until an even later age. Such sentences can present the instructions in simple sequentially, that is, in order to perform correctly it is necessary only to follow the order in which events are mentioned (Y before X; after X, Y) or instructions can be given in reverse sequentiality (before X, Y; X after Y), where the commands must be followed in the reverse order from that in which they are mentioned. Simple sequentially is understood at an earlier age than reverse sequentiality, and, indeed, some researchers (Ferreiro & Sinclair, 1971) suggest that it is not until approximately 6 to 7 years that the majority of children consistently interpret such sentences correctly. These observations are taken as support for Piaget's position that cognitive development precedes linguistic development. Children must acquire reversible operations before they can comprehend complex tenses such as the future perfect and past progressive or can correctly use "before" and "after " in both simple and reverse sequentiality. Thus a variety of different sources conspired to direct our attention to the problem of sequentiality as an initial step in the examination of the ontogenesis of temporal concepts. We reasoned that once we had established the pa31

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY rameters governing the ability to place items in simple temporal succession, we would then be in a position to examine the more complex and, we thought, more interesting temporal operations that depend on the ability to seriate. That was 3 years ago, and we are still examining sedation; indeed, this entire chapter is directed to the problem of simple seriation of temporal succession for children passing from prelogical to operational reasoning. As a result of our general interest in memory phenomena, retention of sequences is used as a method of examining both comprehension of and memory for temporal succession in the majority of studies reported here. It should be pointed out that we believe similar constructive operations underlie both retention and comprehension (Brown, 1975c). Whereas it would appear that there is an ordered sequence of the sections in this chapter, the impression of temporal succession is illusionary. Separate "mini series" of studies were completed, sometimes serially and sometimes in parallel; the order of their inclusion in this chapter was imposed somewhat arbitrarily. For each section both background information and discussion have been provided so that each might stand alone. In the first part of the chapter, we are concerned with the ability of both preoperational and operational children to regenerate stories in correct temporal sequence. There follows a consideration of sequencing ability with particular reference to the transitory stage intervening between prelogical and operative reasoning. Throughout the chapter an attempt was made to integrate the findings within the framework of Piagetian theory. In addition, the relevance of our findings to Piagetian theory is discussed fully in the summary section.

The Regeneration of Stories "Where shall I begin?" asked the White Rabbit. "Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end, then stop." (Lewis Carroll, 1865) The point of departure for this initial series of studies was the apparently contradictory predictions made by Piaget about the ability of preoperational children to regenerate the order of events in a narrative sequence. In The Child's Conception of Time (1969, first published in 1946), Piaget examined the ability to construct and reconstruct stories from a series of pictures in which the entire sequence or the beginning and end points were depicted. In The Language and Thought of the Child (1926), Piaget considered the child's ability to recount a previously heard narrative story to a contemporaneous 32

ANN L. BROWN colleague. In both sources Piaget reported that before the age of 7 to 8 years children's narratives are not chronological, causal, or deductive but "purely egocentric, i.e., events are linked together on the basis of personal interest and not on the real order of time" (Piaget, 1969, p. 272). Similarly, Fraisse (1963) pointed out that children's memories of stories are "completely jumbled up, for they have not learned to reconstruct their past; this is shown by the haphazard way in which they retell stories, for the order of events depends more on their interests or on incidental associations than on reality" (Fraisse, 1963, p. 254). Although Piaget is consistent in reporting children's difficulty in retelling stories, the explanations of why children experience such difficulty are somewhat contradictory. In The Child's Conception of Time (1969), Piaget attributed this failure to (re) construct stories in a coherent order to the child's inability to preserve that order before the period of concrete operations and the attendant capacity for reversibility of thought. . . . reconstructing events in their correct sequence presupposes an ability to go up and down the time scale, i.e., to construct a series A •* B •* C such that the arrows can stand for "precedes" as well as for "follows." Now in establishing this logically reversible series based on an irreversible course of events, our subjects must have sufficient mental mobility to choose from all the possible sequences only those in which the arrows can be given a consistent interpretation. (Piaget, 1969, Pp. 23-24) Therefore, according to this statement, before the onset of operational thought the reconstruction of a series of events should be beyond the problem-solving capacity of the child. Yet, in the same volume, Piaget admits that the seriation of one simple series in isolation need not present problems for preoperational thought, but it is because the series of events involved in almost every story or memory, far from being simple and unique, is highly complex and entangled. . . . A single series of events, such as progress in a particular school subject, can rapidly be reconstructed. However, since it interfaces with other series, such as work in different subjects, family events, social engagements, etc., reconstructing the past calls for the coordination of a host of developments each with a rhythm of its own. Now since small children show a lack of reversibility—they cannot possibly be expected to succeed with the complex system of deductive operations involved in the reconstruction of events. (Piaget, 1969, p. 274) In The Language and Thought of the Child (1926), Piaget again indicates that the maintenance of temporal order can precede logical operativity. Referring 33

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY to the conspicuous absence of a coherent order in the child's recollection of narratives, which is exceptional between 7 and 8 years but is the rule before that period, Piaget notes that the child knows quite well, so far as he himself is concerned, in what order the events of a story or the different actions of a mechanism succeed one another; but he attaches no importance to this order in his exposition. (Piaget, 1926, p. 107) Here the failure to recount events in order is not seen as the result of an irreversibility of thought but as the product of the child's egocentrism as a communicator. Thus the question raised in our initial series of studies was whether the putative failure of young children to retell a story in order is attributable to their lack of expository skills or whether it reflects a failure of operative thought underlying the comprehension and retention of sequentially. RESPONSE MODE: RECOGNITION, RECONSTRUCTION, OR RECALL In the Piagetian story regeneration tasks, children were required to retell stories verbally—a recall task. However, Piaget himself (Piaget, 1968; Piaget & Inhelder, 1973) has observed a developmental progression in the young child's ability to regenerate past experience. Recognition is easier than reconstruction, which in turn is easier than recall (evocation). If the child has difficulty in verbally recounting a story because of an egocentric frame of reference and because of general problems with recall tasks, then it is conceivable that the child would be able to regenerate the order information by reconstruction or recognition. If, however, the child fails to recall events in order because of difficulty with the concept of order per se, then the use of a developmentally less mature response mode should not enhance the child's regeneration of order information. In the first experiment (Brown, 1975b, Experiment 1) kindergarten and second-grade children were asked to listen to, or to make up, five separate stories, each involving an actqr and three distinct items. When a story was provided, the interactions of the actor with each of the three items either could be unconnected events (random) or could form part of a story or logical sequence (ordered). For example, the child was given a picture of a cat (actor) and separate pictures of a pair of glasses, a plane, and a bolt of lightning. An ordered narrative provided by the experimenter would be, "The cat put on his glasses to go for a ride in his plane and then the weather got bad and he was struck by lightning." An example of a random connecting narrative would be, "The cat put on his glasses and then he flew the toy plane and then he

34

ANN L. BROWN Table 1. Mean Number of Correct Orders as a Function of Response Mode and Story Condition (Brown, 1975b, Experiment l)a Reconstruction Subjects^

Ordered

Kindergarten. . . . 4.3 Second grade . . . 4.6

Recall

Random Own Story 3.2 3.6

4.6 4.3

Ordered 2.5 4.4

Random Own Story 1.4 3.8

3.1 4.3

a

All mean scores are out of a possible 5 correct. "N = 1 5 subjects for all groups.

went riding on a bolt of lightning." Subjects in the own-story condition were given the actor and the three associates and asked to make up a story involving the pictures. After the five stories were completed, the children were required to regenerate the order of events by means of free recall or physical reconstruction of the pictures in the correct sequence. The mean numbers of correctly ordered stories are presented in Table 1, where it can be seen that older children can regenerate the stories both by verbal recall and by nonverbal reconstruction. In contrast, kindergarten children have difficulty recalling the stories but are quite capable of reconstructing the sequence of events nonverbally. For both age groups the ordered (logical) sequences and self-produced stories always produced significantly better performance than did the random stories, a point to which we shall return later. One factor that could explain the kindergarteners' problem with the recall tasks is that in order to ensure that differential recall of item information would not contaminate across-age comparisons (Bryant 6k Trabasso, 1971), all children were re-presented with the story items for the retention tests. The order was randomized across subjects with the restriction that it not be identical to the "correct" order. The subjects in the reconstruction condition were allowed to manipulate the items and to try out orders, until they were satisfied. Not only were recall subjects not allowed active manipulation, but they were required to recall the order in the presence of a misleading perceptual (randomized) order. Older children were not confused by the misleading perceptual array; however, children of this age are able to decenter temporal sequence from distracting perceptual cues (Piaget, 1969). Younger children may have failed to recall accurately because they were mislead by the presence of a conflicting perceptual array. In order to test this hypothesis (Brown, 1975b, Experiment 2), another group of kindergarten children was tested for recall of sequences when the perceptual array corresponded to the remem35

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY bered narrative sequence. On recall trials, the three response items were placed in front of the subject in the order of their original occurrence in the story. The mean numbers of totally correct orders for the kindergarten recall conditions of Experiment 1 were 2.5 for the ordered condition and 1.4 for the random condition. The comparable data from Experiment 2 were 4.3 for the ordered condition compared with 3.6 for the random condition, a significant difference. Presenting the items in the retention array in the same order they originally occupied in the story dramatically improved the recall scores of kindergarten children compared with test conditions in which the items occupied scrambled positions. Indeed, the superior presentation condition produced recall scores very similar to the reconstruction scores of kindergarteners in Experiment 1 (4.3 vs. 4.3 and 3.3 vs. 3.6, respectively) for ordered and random conditions. Thus the difficulty for the younger children of Experiment 1 in recalling order was in part the result of a misleading perceptual array present on the retention test. When the order of events is perceptually reproduced, sufficient stimulus support is provided to mediate recall. Recalling item order in the presence of that order does not provide a stringent test of Piaget's theory. Indeed, such a task may be more similar to recognition than to recall. Therefore, the experiment was repeated with naive kindergarten subjects, using cumulative interactive pictures as retention prompts. These prompts depicted all the items, but the order in which they were added to the scene was not available (examples of pictures used may be seen elsewhere [Brown, 1975a, 1975b]). Since the prompt consisted of all the story events in interaction, no information, helpful or otherwise, concerning serial order of events was available when retention was tested. In addition to recall and reconstruction, recognition tests were also given. In all conditions the subjects were given the cumulative pictures as prompts and required to "think of the story about the cat (dog, etc.) and," (a) recalltell it to the experimenter exactly as things happened to the cat, etc.; (b) reconstruction—put the scrambled events in correct order by choosing item 1 first then 2, etc., with no opportunity to rearrange; and (c) recognition—select the correct sequence from the six possible orderings of the three stimulus items. The mean numbers of correctly ordered stories are presented in Table 2, where it can be seen that reconstruction is the response mode that produces superior performance and ordered sets are regenerated better than random sets. Considering first the reconstruction and recall measures, the results clearly replicate those of the initial study (Brown, 1975b, Experiment 1). Thus, recall of order in the absence of ordered information in the response prompt 36

ANN L. BROWN Table 2. Mean Number of Correct Orders as a Function of Response Mode and Story Condition (Brown, 1975b, Experiments 3 and 4)a Recognition Experiment 3 4

Ordered . . . 2.5 . . . 4.7

Reconstruction

Recall

Random

Ordered

Random

Ordered

Random

2.4 47

4 5

3.8

2.7

1.9

a

N = 10 kindergarten subjects for all groups. All mean scores are out of a possible 5 correct.

is significantly inferior to nonverbal reconstruction of sequence. Even though no active trial and error was permitted, kindergarten children were still able to perform extremely well on the reconstruction task. Although subjects given recognition tests seemed to be performing above chance, a considerable number of the children appeared to be choosing the top right-hand alternative rather than scanning the available arrays for a correct solution. The children appeared to be overwhelmed by the provision of six retention test sequences, comprising 18 pictures. Systematic scanning of complex pictures, containing much information, is known to be a problem for young children (Mackworth & Bruner, 1970; Vurpillot, 1968). Furthermore, Braine (1959) has shown that selecting a matching order in a match-tosample task is difficult for young children because they fail to scan the choice arrays systematically. For these reasons, the recognition condition was repeated (Brown, 1975b, Experiment 4) using only two distractors so that the problem of systematic scanning would be reduced. In order to provide a conservative test, the two distractors contained the orders most commonly produced as errors in the other two conditions. The mean numbers of correct orders are shown in Table 2, together with comparable data from the preceding experiment. There were extremely high levels of performance for ordered sets for both recognition and reconstruction. Indeed, the ceiling effect makes it impossible to compare the two response modes. However, recall scores—even on ordered series—were reliably lower than reconstruction and recognition. Recall was inferior to reconstruction for the random sets. The difference between the new recognition data and the reconstruction data (4.7 vs. 3.8 correct sets) was reliable. Thus, in the more difficult random-sequence task, the order of response mode difficulty followed the predicted order, i.e., recognition > reconstruction > recall (Piaget & Inhelder, 1973). Preoperational children, given the task of recounting stories, often failed 37

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY to describe events in the order of their original occurrence. Their narratives typically involved the correct interactions, but the order of each interaction within the series was juxtaposed. However, this failure is not the result of the child's inability to "reconstruct his past" as suggested by Fraisse (1963), but it is the product of the child's general difficulties with the demand characteristics of recall tasks and/or his immature expository powers. The 5-year-old child is capable of reproducing the order of events in a story if his memory is assessed by means of recognition or reconstruction. It is the task of retelling the story verbally that presents difficulties for the young child. Not only are young children quite capable of retaining order within narrative sequences, they are also capable of composing their own acceptable narratives. Piaget (1969) reports that children below 7 to 8 years failed to construct stories linking two pictures representing the beginning and the end points. Yet, with a minimum of pretraining, we found that 5-year-old children were able to construct acceptable stories linking three pictures. Although the stories produced by the younger children lacked linguistic elegance (interactions were typically linked by "and then" rather than by more advanced temporal constructions), they clearly followed a comprehensible sequence often containing causal (albeit magical) connections between events. Children tended to compose their own stories and reproduce imposed logical sequences in a syntactic and lexical style suitable to their linguistic level (Binet & Henri, 1894). THE CHILD AS COMMUNICATOR

"and the Archbishop of Canterbury found it advisable." "Found what" said the Duck. "Found it" the mouse replied crossly "of course you know what it means." "I know what it means when I find a thing" said the Duck. (Lewis Carroll, 1865) Our current studies on story recall in preoperational children have as their focus children's lack of expository skills rather than their understanding of order per se. This work is in the pilot stage so we shall briefly summarize our findings here. In general our data are in accord with the Piagetian position, and we have identified a similar set of deficiencies, in addition to the child's disregard of order, in the narrative skills of young children. Anaphoric Reference. As reported initially by Piaget (1926), we have found frequent use of indeterminate pronouns, i.e., "pronouns personal and demonstrative adjectives, etc., he, she or that, the, him, etc., are used right and left 38

ANN L. B R O W N without any indication of what they refer to" (Piaget, 1926, p. 102). Examples of recall protocols will best explain the point. The first set is from Piaget's Language'and Thought of the Child (1926); the second set is our own data. The Story of Niobe Original Version Once upon a time, there was a lady who was called Niobe, and who had 12 sons and 12 daughters. She met a fairy who had only one son and no daughters. Then the lady laughed at the fairy because the fairy only had one boy. Then the fairy was very angry and fastened the lady to a rock. The lady cried for ten years. In the end she turned into a rock, and her tears made a stream which still runs today (Piaget, 1926, p. 82). Gio's Version, age 8 years Once upon a time there was a lady who had 12 boys and 12 girls and then a fairy, a boy and a girl. And then Niobe wanted to have some more sons than the fairy. Then she [who?] was angry. She [who?] fastened her [whom?] to a stone. He [who?] turned into a rock and the tears [whose?] made a stream which is still running today (Piaget, 1926, p. 102). Met's Version, age 6 years 4 months The lady laughed at this fairy because she [who?] only had one boy. The lady had 12 sons and 12 daughters. One day she [who?] laughed at her [whom?]. She [who?] was angry and she [who?] fastened her [who?] beside a stream. She [who?] cried for 50 months and it made a great big stream (Piaget, 1926, p. 106). How to Fool a Cat (From F. Sakade, 1959) Original Version Once upon a time there was a rich lord who liked to collect carvings of animals. He had many kinds, but he had no carved mouse. So he called two skilled carvers to him and said: "I want each of you to carve a mouse for me. I want them to be so lifelike that my cat will think they're real mice and pounce on them. We'll put them down together and see which mouse the cat pounces on first. To the carver of that mouse I'll give this bag of gold." So the two carvers went back to their homes and set to work. After a time they came back. One had carved a wonderful mouse out of wood. It was so well done that it looked exactly like a mouse. The other, however, had done very badly. He had used some material that flaked and looked funny; it didn't look 39

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY like a mouse at all. "What's this?" said the lord. "This wooden mouse is a marvelous piece of carving but this other mouse—if it is indeed supposed to be a mouse—wouldn't fool anyone, let alone a cat." "Let the cat be brought in," said the second carver. "The cat can decide which is the better mouse." The lord thought this was rather silly, but he ordered the cat to be brought in. No sooner had it come into the room than it pounced upon the badly carved mouse and paid no attention at all to the one that was carved so well. There was nothing for the lord to do but give the gold to the unskillful carver, but as he did so he said: "Well, now that you have the gold, tell me how you did it?" "It was easy, my lord," said the man. "I didn't carve my mouse from wood. I carved it from dried fish. That's why the cat pounced upon it so swiftly." When the lord heard how the cat and everyone else had been fooled, he could not help laughing, and soon everyone in the entire court was holding his sides with laughter. "Well," said the lord finally,"then I'll have to give two bags of gold. One to the workman who carved so well, and one to you who carved so cleverly. I'll keep the wooden mouse, and we'll let the cat have the other one." Steven's Version, age 4 years 6 months Once upon a time there was a carver who had dolls, he—a mouse, mouse dolls and he didn't know how to get one and then decided to make the mouse and then he made one and then another guy made a mouse and then it was good and then another guy did but it wasn't good. Then—he, went and then—they talked about it then they got the cat and he paid no attention to the good one, he just paid attention to the bad one and then he— (pause) said that the good one was good but, and the clever one was clever—that's the end. Piaget believes that this narrative style is largely the result of the child's egocentrism. Post-recall prompts revealed repeated cases (such as Gio's) where the child knew perfectly well that the fairy fastened Niobe to a rock and not vice versa but failed to make this clear in the narratives. Steven fails and Gio fails because they cannot, or do not, consider their listener's perspective when recounting. Such deficiencies in the child as communicator create difficulties for those wishing to assess his memory for narratives. Conversational Implicature. Adequate communication demands that the listener understand the "total significance of a remark—including comprehension of what the speaker has said and what he has implicated, indicated, suggested, etc." (Grice, 1972). It is the communicator's job to convey both ex40

ANN L. B R O W N plicit and implicit information to the listener. Both conveyors and receivers of information rely on extralinguistic factors to determine the total significance of a message. Listeners attempt to comprehend by means of "speaker coherence factors" (Wertsch, 1974) in that the listener relies on (and the communicator presupposes he will) general background knowledge to disambiguate utterances. Linguists have described in detail the assumptions underlying conversational implicature (Grice, 1972; Gordon & Lakoff, 1971). In brief, mature communicators obey rules about the relation of what is said and what is implicated in a particular context. The speaker assumes the listener's understanding of conversational implicature and only specifies the implicit when he doubts that assumption. The most common occasion when the adult judges the listener incapable of using the speaker coherence factors of conversational implicature is when that listener is a child; then adults systematically adjust the grammatical complexity of their speech (Drach, 1969; Pfuderer, 1969; Snow, 1972). The adult speaks as if the child cannot be depended on to use the speaker-coherence factor properly, either because the two do not share common experiences on which to map the information or because the child does not consider the adult's viewpoint in communicative situations (Piaget, 1926). Adults use significantly fewer third-person pronouns when speaking to younger (2 years) versus older (10 years) children (Snow, 1972), thereby avoiding the problem of pronominal reference. By rephrasing the message so that the listener does not have to rely on the speaker-coherence factor, the possibility of egocentric interpretation is minimized. Although adult speakers edit their language on the basis of their estimation of the listener's capacity to use the speaker-coherence factor, children often fail to show a similar sensitivity to younger children's comprehension processes. Piaget (1926) suggests in his pioneering studies that it is not until the period of concrete operations that children are able to overcome their egocentrism and take the listener's competency into account. Although Shatz and Gelman (1973) observed that even 4-year-old children adjust their speech patterns when addressing younger children when the task is to provide a simple description of a toy, we have found little evidence of modification of story recall to suit the developmental level of a younger listener. This ability appears to develop quite late (Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, & Jarvis, 1968); however, we are currently investigating the problem in preschool children under conditions where retelling a story is less artificial than has usually been the case. Children are interrupted while watching a movie by the arrival of a new child. 41

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y The original viewer is then asked to provide the newcomer with a summary of the events that occurred before the newcomer arrived so that he might understand the remainder of the story. The new viewer is either of the same age or obviously younger than the original viewer. In a "meaningful" situation like this we hope to evaluate realistically the ability of the young child to retell stories coherently and to take into consideration the developmental level of an audience. In an effort to communicate to a less mature listener, the preoperational child may produce more coherent recall, since he cannot presuppose that speaker coherence factors will be operating in the audience. The Meaning of Recall Instructions. We have resorted to the tasks just described because we have had difficulty impressing young children that we wish them to retell a story to us and that this is a reasonable demand. In general, instructions to recall a story are not meaningful for the child. In both incidental and intentional memorization conditions, the child is eventually required to retell the story to an adult who clearly already knows the story (has just, in fact, related it to the child). This is viewed as a meaningless request, and young subjects generally are not cooperative under such conditions. Therefore, a further aspect of our current studies is to assess recall in an interesting or meaningful situation, for it is in the context of a meaningful activity that memory is most efficient in preschool children (Brown, 1975c; Murphy & Brown, 1975; Yendovitskaya, 1971). To this end we have children reenact a story, with puppets and props, either to an audience or in order to make a video tape. To date these studies are in their formative stages, but it is apparently true that a considerable amount of effort and ingenuity will be needed if we are to assess realistically young children's ability to remember stories, because of their deficiencies as communicators.

The Degree of Stimulus Support: Simultaneous or Successive Presentation So far we have considered the degree of stimulus support needed by the child when reconstructing a series of events. However, stimulus support is also an important factor when the child is apprehending the series initially. Pufall and Furth (1966) have shown that preschool children remember sequences presented simultaneously far better than sequences presented successively. They believe that with successive presentation the sequence (which is never actually viewed as a unit) needs to be internally structured and maintained, whereas with the simultaneous presentation, only the maintenance of a previously perceived unit is required. In support of this position, Fraisse (1963) 42

ANN L. BROWN Table 3. Proportion of Totally Correct Orders as a Function of Presentation Mode and Story Condition (Brown & Murphy, 1975, Experiments 3 and 4) Simultaneous Experiment a

3 4b

Successive

Ordered

Random

Ordered

Random

90 89

.74 .71

.88 .91

.49 .52

*N== 21 for Experiment 3, within-subjects design. bjv = 13 per group, between-subjects design.

has suggested that the young child's grasp of the order of events becomes uncertain as soon as the perception of succession is not obvious. "A 5-year-old child has no difficulty in perceiving the temporal succession of two events, but this perception is very precarious if the two stimuli do not obviously belong to the same series of events" (Fraisse, 1963, p. 252). Thus, reconstruction of a temporal sequence should be more difficult if the items in the initial sequence are viewed successively rather than simultaneously where the unitization (Horowitz, Lampel, & Takanishi, 1969) of the sequence is apparent. Therefore, in the next series of experiments (Brown & Murphy, 1975, Experiments 3 & 4) we examined the child's reconstruction of ordered series viewed (a) simultaneously, where all four items of the sets were presented in the correct serial order in front of the subject, and (b) successively, where the four items of a set were placed one by one on the same spot, so that each successive item covered the preceding item. The proportions of sequences correctly reconstructed are presented in Table 3. Performance was uniformly high under both presentation conditions when an ordered (logical) sequence was presented; we shall return to the effects of a logical order later. For random sequences, performance was far superior when the presentation of the four items in a set was simultaneous rather than successive. This effect was replicated in a subsequent experiment in the series (Brown & Murphy, 1975, Experiment 4) where a logical order was provided by an accompanying narrative rather than by depicted interactions. These data are also given in Table 3. A further replication of this effect was made because the variable of simultaneous vs. successive presentations was confounded by the presence/absence of additional spatial cues to reinforce the temporal succession. In the simultaneous condition the pictures occupied distinct spatial positions corresponding to their actual position in the sequence, but in the successive condition all the pictures occupied the same spatial position (picture C was placed on top of B, which in turn had covered picture A). Thus, additional groups of pre43

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY school and first-grade children were tested on the random sets of the previous experiments. One-third of the children received a simultaneous presentation as previously described; one-third received the successive presentation used earlier (B on top of A, etc.); and the remaining children received a successive presentation in which each item was placed in a distinct spatial location (B beside A, C beside B), but each item was removed before the presentation of its successor. The mean proportions correct as a function of age and presentation condition are presented in the accompanying tabulation. The performance of firstAge

Successive (No Spatial Cue)

Successive (Spatial Cue)

.64

.49

A3

.75

.69

.79

Simultaneous

Preschool . . . . CA4.4 First grade . . CA7.1

N = 10 subjects per group (between-subjects design) for both age groups. grade children was not affected by the presentation condition; however, the preschool children performed significantly better when the items were viewed simultaneously as a unit rather than successively, thus replicating the previous experiments. The difference between the two successive conditions was not reliable; therefore, the addition of spatial cues did not aid performance in the successive condition. The superiority of the simultaneous mode was affirmed, thus replicating Pufall and Furth (1966). Preschool children are able to reconstruct a sequence from memory if originally they were able to view that sequence as a unit, owing to the simultaneous presentation of the items. If, however, because of a successive presentation, the total sequence is never actually experienced as a unit, the child must mentally construct that sequence for himself. Four-yearolds experience difficulty with this task because the mental construction of an implicit order is not yet within the capacity of their emergent cognitive operations .(Fraisse, 1963; Piaget, 1969). However, the difference between simultaneous and successive presentations disappears by first grade; again, this is a replication of Pufall and Furth (1966), who found that by 6 years of age the superiority of the simultaneous presentation had all but disappeared. The powerful effect of providing an inherent logical order to a sequence was again apparent in this series of studies: when 4-year-olds are given a logical ordering or narrative sequence to connect the items in an array, they are

44

ANN L. B R O W N able to construct mentally a sequence that they have not viewed directly. The order of items is determined by the connecting story and this is sufficient to provide a unifying cohesion to the items, even though viewed successively. We turn now to a series of studies where the influence of providing a connecting logical sequence was examined directly.

Logical vs. Arbitrary Sequences* "What sort of things do you remember best" Alice ventured to ask. "Oh things that happened the week after next" the Queen replied. "For instance there's the King's messenger. He's in prison being punished and the trial doesn't even begin till next Wednesday, and of course the crime comes last of all." "Suppose he never commits the crime" said Alice. "That would be all the better wouldn't it?" the Queen said. (Lewis Carroll, 1872) It is difficult to examine the influence of logical vs. arbitrary sequence in a separate section, as this issue has been a constant aspect of our investigations. Here we shall concentrate on a series of studies where this was the principal focus of interest; however, the importance of logical sequences is discussed throughout the chapter. We have already seen that providing a logical connection between successive events in a sequence influences the ability of young children to reproduce that sequence from memory. Yet, if one considers the assumptions made by Fraisse (1963) and Piaget (1969), one would not necessarily predict this effect. Fraisse (1963) has suggested that in reconstructing ordered sequences, adults use their inferential reasoning capacities to seek and produce the most *A common feature of all our work in this area is that we have compared sequences construction and memory when the sequences are arbitrarily constructed or when they obey some inherent order. We have used the term "logical sequence" throughout; however, this title includes varying degrees of constraints, and we would not like anyone to think that it implies more than it does. The type of sequences we have called "logical" are those in which there appears to be some reason that A precedes B. A is logically prior; however, the relation between event A and B varies on a continuum of degree of causality. Borrowing from Rumelhart's (1975) terminology, the relation can be "allow, initiate, or causal." Although we shall refer to these relations as causes and effects, it should be noted that we are using the term "cause" very loosely, as do both Piaget (1969) and Fraisse (1963), to denote both precipitating factors and logically prior events (not necessarily causally related—for example, a child writing a letter before posting it or putting on a sock before a shoe). Since we obtained the effects reported, even with the weaker "allow" relations, our interpretations are conservative.

45

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY probable order of events; the regeneration of each event serves as a logical retrieval cue for the next event in the series. Thus, the most easily reconstituted series for adults are those that correspond to causal or logical sequences. Children's alleged difficulties in reproducing stories and reconstructing ordered sequences (Fraisse, 1963; Piaget, 1969) are said to stem from their failure to capitalize on "causal or logical relationships founded on probability." In order to do this, children would be required to "trace the cause from the effect . . . to run through the series in both directions; they would, in fact, have to be capable of reversibility" (Fraisse, 1963, Pp. 254-255). It would follow from this position that preoperational children should behave similarly when remembering either logical or arbitrary sequences, since such children are unable to capitalize on the inherent logic of the ordered materials. As we have seen, our data do not appear to support this contention. In the following studies we examined this in detail. Our initial study (Brown & Murphy, 1975, Experiment 1) was a failure, but because it was the initiating point for later work, it will be mentioned briefly here. It is also of interest since it constitutes one of our finer nonreplications of Piaget. We needed a task in which the child could be expected to copy a sequence with a model present. If the child could not reproduce the sequence with a model present, he could scarcely be expected to reproduce it with the model absent. We selected Piaget's clothesline problem (Piaget & Inhelder, 1956) because a significant amount of baseline data on the child's ability to copy such sequences has been generated from other studies using similar tasks. The child is provided with a set of clothing and two clotheslines, and is required to copy a sequence of items pegged on the experimenter's line (referred to as the model array). Using this basic task, we examined reconstruction of the order with the model array present and memory for the array in the absence of the model. In addition, the sequences were composed either of random arrays or of logical orderings based on the child's preferred order of dressing. Preschool children were asked to dress a Sasha doll (of indeterminate sex) the same way they dressed themselves in the morning. Following this the children's ability to copy the order of up to seven items with the model present was assessed. The task appeared to be an extremely simple one, with 11 out of 13 3-year-olds, 12 out of 13 4-year-olds, and 11 out of 12 5-year-olds performing with no errors. Following this the children were required to remember sequences of up to seven items arranged in logical (preferred order of dressing) or arbitrary succession. Performance was extremely accurate, with 46

ANN L. B R O W N the average number of trials required to reach criterion of two perfect reconstructions of a seven-item series being 2.52 (a score of 2 would denote no errors). The performance of preschool children in this study was superior to that previously reported (Pufall & Furth, 1966); reconstructing order, either in the presence or absence of the model, was a simple task. In our attempt to select a sequence that would be sufficiently easy for preschool children to copy, we had chosen a task that did not permit us to examine the variable of principal interest—logical vs. arbitrary sequences. The extremely good performance both in copying and regenerating sequences, however, should be noted in view of the presumptive difficulty children of this age have with sequence (re)construction tasks (Piaget, 1969). Foiled by the clothesline problem, we turned to a picture-sequencing task and manipulated the interval between viewing and regenerating a sequence in our attempt to achieve the desired level of difficulty—one that would enable us to compare the reconstruction of logical vs. arbitrary orders. In the second experiment in the series (Brown & Murphy, 1975, Experiment 2), naive preschool children were presented with a series of four-item sets; two-thirds of the sets depicted a logical (ordered) sequence, the remainder (random sets) included four unrelated items. Half the ordered sets were presented in the correct order; the remaining ordered sets were scrambled. Each series was constructed so that a test trial followed a viewing trial after 0, 2, or 5 intervening trials (lag). The mean numbers of sets reconstructed correctly are presented in the accompanying tabulation. Performance remained extremely acLag

Ordered

Random

Scrambled

0 2 5

91 92 88

91

65

69 .57

51 .29

All scores are based on 45 observations.

curate over lags in the ordered condition, but there was a significant decline in accuracy as a function of increasing lag for both the random and scrambled conditions. The provision of a logical sequence to connect the items of a set resulted in high levels of accuracy and was sufficient to maintain that accuracy even with a separation of five sets between viewing and regeneration. In the absence of a connecting logic, performance was accurate on an immediate test—thus confirming the findings of the clothesline experiment—but performance declined as the interval between viewing and testing increased. Without a story to connect the items, memory for sequences declined as a function of lag. 47

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY There was an intriguing pattern of performance on scrambled sets. Here the children had to disregard the inherent order of a set and reproduce the random order actually presented. Accuracy levels were always lower on scrambled than on random sets, suggesting that it is difficult to disregard an inherent order. If so, one might predict that errors on the scrambled sets would be nonrandom. Of the 143 error trials, 51 (36 percent) were "correct" reconstructions in the sense of reproducing the logical rather than the viewed order. When the lag 5 error trials (67) were considered, 37 (55 percent) of the reconstructions followed the "correct order." In this effort after meaning (Bartlett, 1932; Piaget & Inhelder, 1973), the children reconstructed better orders than those they viewed initially. The consistent superiority of ordered sets could be a function of the inherent order providing a unifying cohesion to the sequence of events, a cohesion that aids memory. Alternatively, it could be that the high level of accuracy with ordered sets reflects not memory for order but the ability to construct that order. Even without a viewing trial, the children might be able to construct the order because a logical sequence or narrative was involved. We were concerned that the powerful effect of providing an inherent logic could be such an artifact, so we replicated the basic design (Brown & Murphy, 1975, Experiment 4) using stimulus sets consisting of isolated items. The logical ordering was imposed by providing meaningful connective narratives (Clark & Bower, 1969; Levin, 1970; Levin & Rohwer, 1968) linking the items in the ordered but not in the random sets. Thus the subjects all saw the same stimulus sets, sets that could not be ordered correctly without the viewing trials (confirmed by pilot testing on separate sets of subjects). Logical order was conveyed by explicit verbal prompts (Rohwer, 1973) for half the subjects but not for the remainder. Furthermore, two connective stories were provided for each set of pictures, stories that demanded different orderings of the items. Thus the "correct" order of the items would vary depending on the particular narrative provided. An example of a set of four items would be mouse, bench, nail, and church, for which the unifying story was, "Once upon a time a little grey mouse found water dripping on her house from a leak in the roof, so she climbed onto a bench and put a nail into the roof of the church to mend the leak." The second ordering of the pictures was church, mouse, bench, and nail. The accompanying narrative for this order was, "Once upon a time there was an old church. In the church a little grey mouse made her home under one of the church benches. She could always find her way home to her bench, because it was the only one with a nail sticking out." 48

ANN L. BROWN Table 4. Proportion of Totally Correct Orders as a Function of Story Type and Lag (Brown & Murphy, 1975, Experiments 3 and 4) a Ordered Story

Random Story

Lag

Experiment 3^

Experiment 4

0

91

.89 .90 .89

2.

.90

5

88

C

Experiment 3^

Experiment 4 C

.83 .63 .37

.84 .61 .42

a

For both experiments the data are collapsed across simultaneous and successive presentation conditions. ^Experiment 3 figures are based on 42 observations (within-subjects design). c Experiment 4 figures are based on 13 subjects per group (ordered and random), 52 observations per condition (between-subjects design).

The mean numbers of orders reconstructed correctly are presented in Table 4. The experiment 3 data are for logical sequences that were depicted visually, and the Experiment 4 data are for sequences unified by the connecting narratives as just described. The two sets of data are virtually identical. The children's accuracy declined with increasing lag when unrelated items constituted the sequences; however, the presence of a connective narrative led to excellent performance with no decline in accuracy associated with increasing lag. Meaningful sequences are regenerated from memory more readily than are arbitrary sequences. We have already seen that when a logical sequence is provided, there is superior performance with either reconstruction or recall, although when recognition is the response mode (Brown, 1975b, Experiments 1-4), there is a ceiling effect and interpretation is difficult. In addition, the provision of an inherent order is sufficient to overcome the problem preschool children have in reconstructing a sequence never actually experienced as a unit. This facilitating effect of the connective logic was also shown in a separate series of experiments (Brown, 1975a, Experiments 1-3) concerned with the progressive elaboration technique used to study integrative imagery in paired-associates learning. Although these studies do not contribute greatly to the theme of this chapter, they are mentioned briefly as a further illustration of the superiority of logical vs. arbitrary orders. We examined retention both of item information, i.e., which items were successively paired with which stimulus characters (cat, dog, etc.), and of order information, i.e., the temporal order of these pairings. For kindergarteners, second graders, and fourth graders, retention of order information depended upon the type of elaboration. If successive interactions were added in a meaningful temporal order (corresponding to the unfolding of a logical story), retention of order information was superior to instances 49

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Table 5. Mean Number of Complete Sentences Correct as a Function of Order of Mention (Maintained, Reversed), Logical vs. Arbitrary, and Specific Connectives (French & Brown, 1975) Logical Connective Before After

. . . . . .

Arbitrary

Maintained

Reversed

Maintained

Reversed

.63 .71

.60 .60

.36 .43

.24 .24

where successive interactions were added in a random order—a nice replication of the pattern of results described in this section. Further support for the superiority of logical sequences was obtained when we studied the comprehension of temporal connectives (French & Brown, 1975). Comprehension of the words "before" and "after" was assessed by having preschool children act out, with toys, events contained in sentences read aloud. The sentences contained two events, conjoined either by "before" or "after." Eight logical sequences of two events were formed, and eight arbitrary sequences were then formed by recombining randomly the events of the logical sequences. The logical sequences were formed with the following constraints. The first event would not cause the second event but would be a reasonable prior event. The second event could be done without performing the first event. Thus sentences such as "Make the doll fall down after she slips on a banana peel" or "Open the garage door before you put the car in the garage," although "logical," were not acceptable under the above constraints. Examples of acceptable logical sequences used in the study were "After Raggedy Ann fills the bottle she feeds the baby" and "Raggedy Ann puts the money in the purse before she closes the purse." Possible arbitrary sequences formed from these logical sequences would be "Raggedy Ann fills the bottle before she closes the purse" and "After Raggedy Ann puts the money in the purse, she feeds the baby." Half of the sentences contained "before" and half contained "after." In half of the sentences, the temporal clause preceded the main clause and in the other half it followed the main clause. Thus there were four types of sentences that can be schematized as: After X, Y; Y after X; before Y, X; X before Y. The data are presented in Table 5 where it can be seen that performance improves dramatically in the logical-sequence condition.

Integration and Inference . . . suddenly a footman came running out of the woods—(Alice considered him to be a footman because he was in livery; other50

ANN L. BROWN wise, judging by his face she would have called him a fish). (Lewis Carroll, 1865) Given the consistent superiority shown even by preschool children in reconstituting logical sequences, it seems that children are capable of capitalizing on causal relations founded on probability. Contrary to the prediction of Fraisse (1963), children, like adults, behave differently when reproducing arbitrary instances in isolation from a larger context than when reconstituting a meaningful unitized event (Brown, 1975c; Horowitz et al., 1969; Jenkins, 1973). When attempting to reconstitute a meaningful series, preoperational children perform more efficiently, suggesting that they can appreciate logical connections and can use inferential reasoning. One explanation of the superiority of logical sequences is that a process of cognitive assimilation may be operating (Binet & Henri, 1894; Barclay, 1973; Jenkins, 1973) that is similar to the process said to underlie the semantic integration phenomena (Bransford, Barclay, & Franks, 1972; Barclay & Reed, 1974; Paris, in press). Apparently, when faced with the task of comprehending and remembering paragraphs, we do not encode individual sentences at all, neither verbatim nor in terms of their linguistic deep structure representation. Instead, we integrate the meaning and relations perceived in the individual sentences into holistic situational descriptions, and we forget syntactic information, such as which relations occurred in which specific sentences. Through the process of semantic integration, we improve comprehension and memory for the ideas being communicated by storing an integrated unified representation of the meaning rather than by storing several fragmentary discrete events. Similarly, when meaningful temporal sequences are constructed and reconstructed, individual pictures may not be treated as representing isolated static events, but meaningful temporal relations may be incorporated into a unified holistic description of the total episode in context (Jenkins, 1973). Though plausible, there has been no direct evidence to support this hypothesis. Therefore, in the next series of experiments (Brown, 1976, Experiments 1 and 2), we examined constructive memory processes in a sequence reconstruction situation that demanded selection of perceived events from a set that either did or did not violate the meaning of the events and the temporal relations between them. Kindergarten, second-grade and fourth-grade children were given a series of pictures depicting a narrative sequence. On test trials the child was required to reconstruct the story by selecting the events actually seen from a set containing old items and two types of new items: new-incon51

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY sistent (events that violated the ordered sequence of the story) and new-consistent (events that were consistent with the order of events in the story but were never actually viewed). If memory for stories involves the retention of the gist of the story in an integrated, unified representation of the meaning (Binet & Henri, 1894; Bransford & McCarrell, 1975; Brown, 1975c; Paris, in press) rather than retention of a series of discrete events, the children should have difficulty distinguishing old pictures from new-consistent pictures. Examples of the picture sets used are illustrated in Table 6. Each set consisted of eight pictures, six depicting events in the unfolding of a narrative story and two containing the same characters, objects, backgrounds, etc., but depicting a logically impossible event—i.e., an event out of temporal sequence with the rest of the story. Care was taken in the preparation of the sets to ensure that all eight items contained the same physical details (characters, colors, etc.) so that rejection of an alternative could not be based on physical similarity or presence/absence of an object or character. In addition, pilot subjects from the first and second grade were able to construct the six-item sequences into the correct order and reject the incorrect items. Following pretraining in the concept of sequencing, the subjects were randomly assigned to one of three narrative conditions (complete, partial, or no narrative). In each condition, the children were given five of eight available stories, one at a time. For each story all children were given event 1 (beginning) and event 6 (terminal) of the sequence plus two randomly selected items from the middle position (events 2 through 5; see Table 6). Thus each story consisted of four items, all presented in the correct serial order. The children in the complete narrative condition were given the four items together with a connective narrative that mentioned all six events in the complete sequence, and the children in the partial narrative condition received a connective narrative that mentioned only the four events actually viewed. Unviewed events were implicit but were not explicitly stated. For example, consider story 1 of Table 6. The complete story was approximately, This is a story about a girl who wants to paint a picture. She gets an easel "picture holder" and canvas (picture 1) and then she starts to paint (picture 2). The girl paints a picture of a mountain on the empty canvas (picture 3). When the girl finishes the picture, she looks at it and is very pleased with herself (picture 4). Then the girl gets a picture frame and puts it on the finished picture (picture 5). When the picture is framed the girl hangs it on the wall (picture 6). If subjects viewed only events 1, 3, 5, and 6, the underlined sentences were included in the story for the complete narrative but omitted for partial narra52

ANN L. B R O W N Table 6. Sample of Pictures Used in the Experimental Phase (Brown, 1976, Experiments 1 and 2) Event 1

Story 1

Story 2

L osteal Narrative Girl getting empty can- Boy putting on coat in vas and easel room beside sled

Story 3 Boy in life jacket in boat with sail up, beside dock, sun overhead

2

Girl beginning to paint on the empty canvas

Boy in coat pulling sled out into the snow, sun overhead

Boy in life jacket in boat with sail up leaving dock

3

Girl painting on canvas (picture half completed)

Boy in coat pulling sled up a hill

Boy seen some distance from dock diving in water from the boat with sail up

4

Girl standing back admiring completed picture on easel

Boy in coat getting on the sled at top of hill

Boy seen swimming by boat with sail up some distance from dock

5

Girl putting frame on completed picture (easel in background)

Boy in coat, lying on sled, going down a hill

Boy in life jacket in boat with sail up returning to dock

6

Girl hanging framed picture on wall (easel in background)

Boy in coat seen returning to the house pulling sled, sun setting

Boy in life jacket putting sail down in boat back at dock, sun setting

1

Girl putting frame on incompleted picture

2

Girl hanging unframed picture on wall (easel in background)

Illogical Events Boy in coat at bottom of hill, sled at the top Boy, without coat, sliding down hill (coat in background)

Boy in boat at a distance from dock but the sail is down Boy swimming at a distance, boat still at dock

tives. The fact that the girl starts to paint (event 2) and finishes the picture (event 4) is implicit in the meaning of the story, even when it is not explicitly stated. The subjects in the no-narrative condition received the pictures in the correct order with no comment from the experimenter. Following the completion of the fifth story, all children were tested for retention of all stories (in the same order as they were viewed). For each story, the eight items of the set were presented in scrambled order, face up in front of the child. The eight items consisted of (a) the four items actually seen (old), (b) the two events omitted from the story but perfectly permissible as part of the sequence (new-consistent), and (c) two new items containing the same character and situations but incompatible with the temporal sequence 53

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY of the events (new-consistent). The children were told to remember what the story was about (e.g., the girl making a picture) and then to select the four pictures they actually saw and make the story again for the experimenter. Accuracy on four types of items was considered, (a) old-anchor (first and last serial position), (b) old-middle, (c) new-consistent, (d) new-inconsistent. The mean proportions of errors as a function of item type and age are shown in Table 7. It should be noted that an error represented an incorrect choice of Table 7. Mean Proportion of Errors as a Function of Item Type and Age (Brown, 1976, Experiment 2) New Items Age

Kindergarten . . . Second grade . . . Fourth grade . . . . . .

Old Items

Inconsistent

Consistent

Anchor

Middle

30 08 .06

.49 .56 .48

.30 .17 .06

.49 .47 .49

a new item but the incorrect rejection of an old item. The data are combined for all narrative conditions because no reliable main effects or interactions involving this variable were found. Performance improved as a function of age only on the selection of old-anchor items and the correct rejection of inconsistent-new alternatives. There was no improvement with age at selecting old vs. new-consistent middle items. Thus the semantic integration phenomenon generalizes to an order reconstruction task. If performance on old-anchor items is excluded (we shall return to this later), children apparently have difficulty distinguishing between items they have actually viewed and items that, though new, are consistent with the total meaning of the story and its temporal sequence of events. Although in the complete narrative condition the actions displayed in the consistent new pictures were mentioned in the story, in the incomplete narrative condition those actions, although implicit in the total meaning, were neither seen nor heard. Thus there is strong support for the semantic integration position given the false alarm errors to consistent new items in the incomplete and no-narrative conditions. Items that preserve the same semantic relations among events are indistinguishable from items actually experienced. No age effects were found on these two types of items, suggesting that the underlying processes of integration and inference are stable across age, even though the types of inferential reasoning possible for young children must be developmentally sensitive (Drozdal & Flavell, 1975; Paris, in press). When regenerating ordered temporal sequences, information is 54

ANN L. BROWN "chunked" into a unified representation of the meaning of the whole sequence, a more efficient method than storing several separate and discrete events (Bransford & McCarrell, 1975). Preschool children (CA = 5.2) were included in the initial study of this series (Brown, 1976, Experiment 1) with a somewhat surprising result. Even when children who failed pretraining in sequencing were excluded, a major difficulty was encountered with the younger children. Required to select the four pictures they had actually seen from an array of eight, 14 of the 24 nursery-school children failed to cooperate. Five of the 14 refused to attempt the task. Two of the remaining children placed all eight items in a row with no obvious attempt at order reconstruction. The remaining 7 children selected the six permissible pictures and made the story. They refused to indicate which of the six they had seen. A typical dialogue was as follows: (experimenter) "Which pictures of the story did you see?" (subject) "These ones" (indicating the six items of their reconstructed story). (experimenter) "How many are there?" (subject, counting) "Six." (experimenter) "How many did you see?" (subject) "Four." (experimenter) "So which ones did you see—pick the four." (subject) "I saw all of them." Although the selection of the six permissible items (never the inconsistent items), together with the inability to reject new-consistent items, would seem to be strong support for an integration hypothesis, the data from these children could not be entered into formal analyses, since the children failed even to indicate a preference for four specific items. The data from the 10 preschool children who cooperated were essentially similar to those from the kindergarteners (CA= 5.7) in the second experiment (Brown, 1976). In this series of studies we also observed the selection strategy adopted by subjects when reconstructing stories. As a child reconstituted a story, he was free to select the composite items in whichever order he wished. The majority of first choices were one of the two anchor items (.73, .86, .90 for kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade, respectively). In addition, there were two other major types of selection strategies: a serial-order strategy, where children chose the items in the order viewed (1, 2, 3, 4) and an end-anchor strategy, where children chose the two anchors first, followed by the middle item. All other selection strategies appeared idiosyncratic and not consistent across 55

M I N N E S O T A S Y M P O S I A O N C H I L DP S Y C H O L O G Y trials. The number of children classified as adopting a consistent strategy as a function of age are shown in the accompanying tabulation. The tendency Strategy

Kindergarten

Second Grade

2

Serial order ( 1 2 3 4 ) Anchor Other

17 11

Fourth Grade

7

9

18 5

19 2

for the adoption of a serial-order strategy to increase with age fell just short of reliable but the decline in random responding across ages was statistically significant. For all ages the majority of children used an end-anchor strategy; however, there was a significant age trend for two types of anchor strategies: select 1 then 6 vs. select 6 then 1. As illustrated in the accompanying tabulation, kindergarteners prefer an end-anchor strategy of selecting first the terStrategy 1 then 6 6 then 1 Total

Kindergarten

Second Grade

Fourth Grade

5

8 10

16

12 17

Fs

3 19

minal item then the initial item; but fourth-graders preferred to select the initial item first. The superior retention of end items by children of all ages and the overwhelming preference shown for an end-anchor first strategy attests to the frequently observed salience of anchor items (DeSoto, London, & Handel, 1965; Feigenbaum & Simon, 1962) and has striking parallels with other observations about ordered relations. Trabasso and his colleagues (Trabasso, 1975; Trabasso & Riley, 1975; Trabasso, Riley, & Wilson, in press) have examined the strategies used by children (as young as 4 years) and adults, when presented with variants of the three-term series problem or linear syllogisms (Hunter, 1957; Huttenlocher, 1968; Johnson-Laird, 1972). The underlying strategy for persons at all ages, according to Trabasso, is to construct an internal spatial representation of the implicit linear sequence in order to integrate and maintain the comparative relations among the events. The strategy involves several discrete steps, but the important finding for our purposes is that the initial step is to isolate end-anchor members, with the linguistically unmarked end (H. H. Clark, 1969a, 1969b, 1973) being isolated first. The end-anchor items are easier to isolate, since they alone are unambiguous with respect to comparative relations, i.e., in Trabasso's modification of the Piagetian seriation task, they alone are only shorter or only taller; other members in the series are both taller and shorter with respect to some other member. 56

ANN L. B R O W N Because there are clear correspondences between temporal and spatial orders, a direct analogy between the seriation and the temporal reconstruction task is possible; and, indeed, it is feasible that the same underlying spatial metaphor may be involved in both(H. H. Clark, 1973;Katz, 1972; MacDonald, 1972; Piaget, 1969). Spatially presented time lines have been used frequently both to test and to aid comprehension of temporal sequence (Cohen, Hansel, & Sylvester, 1954; Cottle & Pleck, 1969; Farnham-Diggory, 1966). Again in the temporal order task, end-anchors are the only items that are unambiguous with respect to comparative time, a fact initially pointed out by Cromer (1971). The initial member is always past with respect to all items that follow, and the terminal member is future from the perspective of all items that precede it. All other members of the series are past with respect to some points in the sequence and future with respect to others. An inability to coordinate the two directions is said to underlie the preoperational child's difficulty with such seriation problems; the ability to do so implies reversibility by reciprocity (Piaget, 1970a), a form of operational logic not thought to be incorporated within preoperational thinking (see the section titled Developmental Stages and the Concept of Order, p. 74, for a discussion of this point). Thus, temporally unambiguous end-anchors should be easier to isolate as are the equally unambiguous end-anchors in a size seriation problem. There is considerable support for this hypothesis in our observations of the isolation of end-anchor items (Brown, 1976, Experiment 2); although the ability to do this does develop with age, even the younger children made significantly fewer errors on anchors than on other old items. In addition, 83 percent of all first choices in reconstructing the sets were anchor items; and 60 percent of all subjects chose an end-item choice strategy (76 percent of all consistent strategies if random responses are excluded). Next, consider the prediction that the linguistically unmarked anchor is isolated first. We did observe a preference for one anchor over the other, but there was a reliable change with age in the type of end-anchor strategy adopted. Fourth graders preferred to isolate the initial item first, whereas the reverse was true for kindergarteners. Can this shift be explained in terms of linguistic markedness? The question is difficult to answer because of controversy about the utility of the marked-unmarked distinction in general, and specifically the suitability of the dichotomy for temporal comparatives is indeterminate (H. H. Clark, 1973; E. V. Clark, 1971; Keller-Cohen, 1974) since, for example, "before" and "after" neither function in a nominal-contrastive manner (H. H. Clark, 1973) nor do they suggest a negative pole marked for 57

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA O N C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y lack of "beforeness," or "afterness." Even if one accepts one of the members (usually "before") as the unmarked pair member as E. V. Clark (1973) does, there is no basis in the theory of linguistic markings to explain a developmental shift from preference for the marked terminal member to preference for the unmarked initial item. The shift remains intriguing and unaccounted for by any theory; we shall return to this point later. Returning to the linear syllogism problem, the image theory of DeSoto et al. (1965) has as one of its governing principles the existence of a natural preference for constructing horizontal arrays working from left to right. Whereas 30 percent of the fourth graders adopted such a strategy, only 7 percent of the kindergarteners did so, suggesting that this preferred order of working may be the product of the acquisition of occidental reading habits. A similar pattern has been reported by Bronckart and Sinclair (1973) who noted that children under 6 years start their descriptions of a series of events with the end result while older children meticulously follow the real time sequence, i.e., the correct serial order.

From Causes to Consequences and Back Again "The cause of lightning" Alice said very decidedly "is the thunder—no no! "she hastily corrected herself "I mean the other way!" "It's too late to correct it" said the Red Queen "when you've once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences." (Lewis Carroll, 1872) In the next series of studies we concentrated specifically on the effect of tracing series from initiating to terminal events and vice versa. Piaget believes that in order to reconstruct a series of events in our past we appeal routinely to causal operations, i.e., we establish a plausible chain between causes and effects. Thus the most easily reconstituted series of events are those that correspond to actual causal sequences. Both Piaget (1969) and Fraisse (1963) believe that young children have difficulty recalling events in order because they lack the capacity to exploit causal or logical relations owing to the fundamental viscosity of thought in the period of preoperational intelligence. Young children are seen as the "prisoners of the present" unable to trace causes from effects and vice versa, since they are not yet capable of the reversible operations that would enable them to run (mentally) through sequences bidirectionally. As we have already seen, our findings are not in complete accord with these predictions since even preoperational children perform better on logical 58

ANN L. B R O W N than on arbitrary sequences and, therefore, are able to exploit causal or logical links to aid their reconstruction of stories. We have, however, always examined the young child's facility for constructing and reconstructing such sequences in an optimal condition where only one brief sequence at a time is to be considered and coordination, or even consideration, of competing series is not required. Piaget (1969) has demonstrated that it is with the complex deductive operations needed to coordinate interlocking series that the preoperational child is confused in his understanding of temporal concepts. Since the seriation of a simple series in isolation from others can depend on ordinal rather than quantitative relations, it is possible that the ability to perform such an operation is within the child's capacity at a relatively early stage. But when coordination between competing series is required or when temporal and spatial succession are not in correspondence, the emergent concept of sequence, based on ordinal relations, is insufficient to mediate the necessary quantitative deductions. For example, if the child is shown a single movement that proceeds from points A to B and then to C, in that order, he will correctly state that A was crossed before C and that it took more time to go from AC than to complete the itinerary AB; indeed, the child acts as though his conception of temporal succession and duration are the same as that of an adult. However, if the situation is complicated somewhat, the impression of mature comprehension disappears. When the child is required to coordinate temporal successions and intervals in two movements at once, and these movements proceed at different velocities, he is quite unable to deal with the problem. The child is unwilling to admit simultaneity of starting and stopping, let alone equality of duration, of two simultaneous movements whose velocities and, therefore, distances traversed, are different. It is feasible that by testing the concept of temporal succession in the simplest possible situation we have similarly suggested the existence of a mature comprehension that would break down if the situation were more complex. Therefore, in order to provide a somewhat analogous situation in our temporal-sequence task, we examined children's ability to seriate logical sequences when they are forced to consider more than one possible sequence at a time and, therefore, more than one possible cause and outcome. The initial series were chosen so that although they competed for attention, no spatial-temporal confusion existed between them and no complex coordination of interlocking sequences was required. Children's performance with these series was intended to provide baseline data for a subsequent study where we would look specifically at coordination of competing time series. We wanted first to 59

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y see if simply by increasing the difficulty, by introducing more than one alternative cause or effect, we could influence the sequencing performance of preoperational children. We have never proceeded to the subsequent study because of (a) the difficulty of constructing interlocking temporal series and (b) the difficulty experienced by our subjects with the "simple" independent series. In several recent studies (Bronckart & Sinclair, 1973; Brown, 1976b;Ferreiro & Sinclair, 1971) of children's comprehension of temporal series, preoperational children have been observed to behave as if they unduly favored the end result of an action sequence. Although older children meticulously follow the real order of events, younger children (3 to 5 years) begin their verbal descriptions with the terminal event and often restrict their descriptions to this event alone (Bronckart & Sinclair, 1973). We have already seen a parallel in our own data when kindergarteners, attempting to reconstruct physically a logical sequence of pictures, tended to choose the terminal item first, but older children selected the initial item first. These characteristics of young children's thinking lead to typical errors. For example, in judging duration they cannot coordinate the times of arrival and departure of two figures moving at different speeds. Even when they understand the simultaneity of starting and stopping of both figures, they cannot deduce that the two movements must have taken the same amount of time. Children typically focus on the end result and conclude that the figure that covered more ground stopped later (Piaget, 1969). It is as though the .

awareness of an action begins with the awareness of its results and it until later that decentration or comparison lead the child back to the itself. Hence small children begin by judging duration of an action quantitative results (number of lines drawn, distance travelled, etc.) than by speed. (Piaget, 1969, p. 277)

is not action by its rather

The concentration on results shown by preoperational children is an example of a more general Piagetian notion: the young child is primarily interested in the physical outcome of actions. This interest is reflected in the child's concentration on the result of a series of events to the relative neglect of the prior events. Although it is assumed that young children can make inferences about both causes (presupposition) and consequences of actions (Paris, in press), no direct comparison of the bidirectional nature of this ability has been made. However, there is reason to suppose that at one period of development, tracing consequences should be easier than tracing causes. Not only do young 60

ANN L. B R O W N Table 8. Examples of Picture Sets Used in the Sequence-Construction Task (Brown & French, 1976, Experiments 1 and 2) Item 1 ....

Initial

Middle

Complete Initial-Item Task Mother and girl outside Girl going into an ice in a shopping center, cream store mother giving girl money

Terminal Girl eating ice cream

2 ....

Girl looking sadly at an overgrown lawn

Lawn mower in a garden shed

Girl mowing lawn

3 ....

Girl covered with dirt entering house

Wash basin, soap, and towels, hands washing

Clean girl looking at clean hands

4 ....

Sewing machine, material, sewing basket

Girl holding finished new dress

5 ....

Hands opening parcel containing a pair of roller skates

Girl pinning new (unfinished) dress on figure Girl putting on skates

6 ....

Complete Terminal-Item Task Girl walking across a Girl falling into the ditch on a plank ditch

Girl skating

Girl in a hospital bed, leg in traction

7 ....

Hand putting tooth paste on brush

Girl brushing teeth

Girl with shining teeth

8 ....

Girl climbing up a slide

Girl sliding down

Girl on ground, obviously fallen off slide (no slide visible)

9 ....

Girl writing a letter

Girl licking the envelope with letter inside

Girl carrying a bowling ball, getting out of a car

Hand throwing ball down lane

Girl standing by a mailbox, reading instructions Ball striking pins

10 . . . .

children restrict their attention to outcomes, but their reasoning processes just before the onset of operational thinking may be unduly goal-directed. The stage at which children begin to seriate simple series corresponds roughly to the period of articulated intuitions (Piaget, 1970a, 1970b), a transitory stage between the preoperational period and true operational thought. This subperiod, although still characterized by a lack of operativity, does involve forms of "semi" logic such as the "directional functions," one-way mappings that do not have inverses which would imply reversibility (Piaget, 1970a, 1970b; Piaget & Garcia, 1971). Before the semilogical functions become incorporated into true operational thinking, they are always "oriented towards 61

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY a goal" (Piaget, 1970b, p. 712)—the relation of order predominates but the rules have only one direction. Thus constructing series starting with the initiating event is a goal-directed activity that traces the natural order of events; tracing causes from outcomes requires mentally reversing the series. Since the directional functions of semilogic are not reversible, this operation should prove difficult before the onset of operational reasoning. To examine this predicted asymmetry, the ability of preoperational and postoperational children to complete sequences was compared under conditions in which the children were required to provide either the outcome or the logically prior events from a set of competing alternatives. Kindergarten, second-, and fourth-grade children had to complete partly finished sequences (Brown & French, 1976, Experiment 1), each consisting of three pictures. There were 20 sets, each depicting the same character in a variety of logical series of actions. The sets were constructed so that selection of an item to fit a particular set could not be based merely on the central character (constant over sets) or on the presence of a distinguishing background. Examples of the sets are given in Table 8. Half the sets were labeled "complete terminal," the other half "complete initial." The difference was that in the complete terminal sets the items necessary to complete a series were the most neutral with regard to background physical cues; in the complete initial sets the initial items, those necessary to complete a series, were judged most neutral. This factor was controlled to the best of our ability, although in some sequences we were more successful than in others. Also, the "neutrality" factor was more successful when only one item had to be completed rather than two. Following pretraining, each child received five trials; on each trial he was presented with four stories to complete. Four answer boards were placed in front of the child, one for each story; the experimenter supplied some of the items and the child had to complete the sequence. On two of the boards the experimenter supplied two items, and on the remainder the experimenter supplied only one. Similarly, on two boards the experimenter supplied initial item(s) and the child had to find the terminal member(s) of the sequence; on the remainder the experimenter supplied terminal item(s) and the child looked for initial item(s). Thus the four boards consisted of, (a) given 2 and 3, find 1; (b) given 3, find 1 and 2; (c) given 1 and 2, find 3; (d) given 1, find 2 and 3. The experimenter placed the given items in the correct serial position, and the spaces to be filled by the child were indicated by black crosses. The items used to complete the four sequences had to be selected from a set of ten—four distractors and the six correct missing items. 62

ANN L. B R O W N Problems requiring the completion of two items were reliably more difficult than those requiring the completion of only one item. Since this variable did not interact with any others, it will not be considered further. The proportions of totally correct sets are presented in the accompanying tabulation, Age Kindergarten Second grade Fourth grade

Complete-Initial Problem 38

.82 .95

Complete-Terminal Problem .64 .85 .98

where it can be seen that fourth-grade children were virtually errorless on this task and second-grade children were not influenced by the direction in which they had to complete a sequence. Kindergarteners, however, performed reliably better when they had to complete terminal items than when they had to provide initial items. Before the emergence of operational logic, children reason by means of a semilogical system that renders them capable of seriating a logical series of pictures only when one cause and effect is present. But the fragility of these emergent directional functions is apparent when several possible causes and effects must be considered. Given the beginning of the story, the young child can select a suitable outcome, a process that follows the natural order of events. However, the directional functions of semilogic are unidirectional, and before they become truly operative they correspond to mappings that have no inverses and are goal directed. As a result, the child at this stage of cognitive development has greater difficulty providing causes for outcomes—a process that would require reversing the normal course of events. Because this logic of functions is not reversible, the young child cannot as readily discern the most probable precipitating factor for a particular outcome. By second grade, however, the child has entered into the period of true operational thought with its characteristic property of reversibility and mental flexibility. Now the child can trace causes and effects in both directions with equal facility. The data from this experiment provided the first indication of the fragility of the concept of temporal sequence in young children. Before this, children younger than 6 years had given no indication that their concept of temporal succession was any different from that of adults. However, merely introducing more than one sequence to seriate disrupted their performance. It should be noted that the series were relatively independent, although the same character was involved in each. If the preoperational child experiences problems coordinating separate series, how much more disruptive would be the 63

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y task of coordinating related series with variable velocities and complicated trajectories. But it is just such interlocking series that are involved in judging "psychological time." Again Piaget gives a cogent example. If we think of several series of independent but overlapping events in our past (for instance of important dates in our career, the dates of our publications, dates in private life and political event), we see that though all these series have remained very much alive in our memory, we must nevertheless use rational and hence operational reconstruction 1) to tell if a given event in one series came before an event in another series (even though the order of succession in each series is perfectly clear), and 2) to give an approximate evaluation (in terms of + or —) of the respective length of the interval between two events in two distinct series. . . . Hence the problem of psychological time like physical time reduces to the coordination of motions and velocities or ... action and the rate at which they are performed. (Piaget, 1969, Pp. 275-276) If the preoperational child's concept of temporal succession can be disrupted by merely asking him to seriate independent series simultaneously, the construct is less robust than we had originally supposed, and it would surely be inadequate to mediate the constructive processes required to coordinate overlapping sequences more typical of "real life" situations. Subsequently (Brown & French, 1976, Experiment 2), we assessed the generality of this asymmetry of cause/effect relations in young children. If children at this stage have difficulty tracing antecedents of possible outcomes, then this difficulty should be reflected in their regeneration of sequences from memory as well as in their initial construction of the series. Therefore, we examined children's ability to recall sequences after reconstructing them. The children were provided with the initial, middle, or terminal items of the set as retrieval cues. Thus if the pattern of results of the previous experiment generalizes to a memory task, one would predict that the initial item would be a superior retrieval cue to the terminal item; i.e., given the initial item it would be less difficult for the preoperational child to provide the consequence than when he is given the terminal item and must provide the cause. Kindergarten and second-grade children were given 12 sets, randomly selected from 20 available sets, 6 from the complete terminal series and 6 from the complete initial series of the previous experiment (see Table 8). The children were given the sets one at a time and required to place them in the correct sequence and to tell the story to the experimenter when they were satisfied with the sequence. Errors were corrected by the experimenter; however, only two kindergarteners made errors and they made only one each. Follow64

ANN L. BROWN ing an interval of approximately 5 minutes the children's recall of the stories was tested in a random order. For each story, the experimenter presented one of the three constituent items as a retrieval cue and asked the children to try to remember the rest of the story; the initial, middle, and terminal items served as retrieval cues an equal number of times. The mean proportions of correctly recalled events (irrespective of order of recall) are presented in the accompanying tabulation. Second graders are not affected by the type of retrieval cues. Age Kindergarten. . Second grade

Initial

Middle

Terminal

66

.50

.38

.71

.71

.74

In contrast, kindergarteners performed reliably better when given an initial item as a retrieval cue than when given the middle item; and the middle item was a better retrieval cue for the kindergarteners than was the terminal item. There is a striking parallel between these data and those of the first experiment: common operations seem to underlie performance in both sequence construction and reconstruction tasks. Because of the operational nature of their reasoning, second-grade children can regenerate a story efficiently regardless of which point in the series is offered as a retrieval cue. Tracing causes from consequences or vice versa is part of the reversible operation they use to deal with seriation problems. Preoperational children, however, lack the flexible inverse to their one-way functions and have greater difficulty reversing to the cause when prompted with an outcome, although they are able to trace outcomes if given the cause, since such a process follows the natural order of events. The combined results of both experiments support the position that a semilogical period precedes true operativity (Piaget, 1970a). Whereas under the most favorable conditions children in the transitional period are capable of constructing and reconstructing logical series (Brown, 1975a, 1975b, 1976), their logical structures are not yet fully developed and they lack the flexibility to run through a series of events in any direction, under any condition. These children display a puzzling form of semilogic that lacks the flexible reversibility characteristic of operational thought, a logic that works efficiently in one direction only. A further example of the unidirectional nature of preoperative thinking illustrates that the puzzling semilogic shown by children in this series of experiments is not an isolated phenomenon. Ferreiro and Sinclair (1971) provided evidence that at exactly the period of semilogic, young children are incapable of starting descriptions of two events with the second 65

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY event without changing the meaning of the sequence of actions. For example, a child, aged 5 years, gave the following correct free-choice description of a series of two events: "the girl cleaned the boy, afterward the boy went up to the top of the stairs." Asked to describe the same sequence starting with the boy, the child tried, "The boy went upstairs and after, the girl cleaned him." Prompting revealed that the child knew this to be an incorrect description of the actual sequence of events, so the experimenter showed the events again and the child attempted, "The boy . . . and the little girl." Finally, in response to the question whether it was possible to reverse the description, the child replied, "No, you've got to start with the girl. If you start with the boy, the boy goes upstairs first, afterward the girl cleans him" (Ferreiro & Sinclair, 1971, p. 44). Again the child knew this to be the wrong order, but it is as if reversing the order of mention must also change the order of occurrence, a delightful example of the problems experienced by children at the stage of one-way mappings. As the Red Queen said, "When you've once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences." (Carroll, 1872)

Reverse Sequentially "It's a poor sort of memory that only works one way," the Red Queen remarked. (Lewis Carroll, 1872) It appears that just before the onset of logical operations it is difficult for children to reverse the sequence of events. They can trace outcomes if given the initiating event, but they have difficulty tracing initiating events from outcomes. A parallel finding has been reported for the child's comprehension of the temporal connections, before and after (E. V. Clark, 1973; Ferreiro & Sinclair, 1971; French & Brown, 1975; Keller-Cohen, 1974). Apparently it is simpler to understand commands when the clauses follow each other in the real order of time (e.g., X before Y, after X, Y), than when the order of clauses does not correspond with the real order of time (before X, Y; X after Y) and, therefore, when compliance with instructions demands that the order of mention be reversed. We were interested to see if this problem of reversal was a general one for preoperational children. Therefore we devised a simple journey in which the child would act out a series of steps and then be required to retrace these steps in forward or reverse order. Because the reconstruction would be from memory, mental reversibility would be required according to a strict interpretation of Piaget. However, since (a) the child would act out the sequences, (b) 66

ANN L. B R O W N the response was nonverbal, and (c) the game was interesting, we believed that an optimal setting to test the child's ability to retrace a temporal sequence bidirectionally would be provided. The child was required to reconstruct the route taken by a baby elephant through several locations of a jungle. From pilot testing we determined that excellent levels of performance could be obtained from 4-year-olds on such a task if forward-order reconstruction was required and if the stages of the journey were linked by a connecting story. Furthermore, the task had one feature of all good mnemonic devices because repeated journeys did not lead to interference within or between sessions. As a result of pilot testing, we decided (erroneously) that a journey of five locations was the optimal number for 4year-olds since there were some errors on a forward reconstruction of such journeys and, therefore, our comparisons would not be masked by ceiling effects. The apparatus was a large table, 4 feet by 7 feet (1.22 m. by 2.13 m.) painted green and containing a mountain range, a lake, a river, water holes, trees and foliage (randomly dispersed), 12 locations and 12 trap doors. The 12 locations, representing feasible jungle sites, were (1) a pride of lions, (2) a herd of hippos in a water hole, (3) a large rock pool with snakes, (4) a native village, (5) an airstrip with a helicopter, (6) a band of chimpanzees in some trees, (7) several crocodiles in a swamp, (8) brightly colored parrots in trees, (9) mountain goats on the mountain, (10) a Daktari jeep and a group of safari tourists, (11) a herd of zebra, and (12) a band of giraffe. In front of each location was a trap door; beneath each trap door was a net; beside each location was a red indicator light. Both the lights and the trap doors could be activated by a small control box carried by the experimenter. In addition to the location animals, two elephants, a mother and a baby, were used. In all experimental conditions the children were told that the baby elephant ran away from its mother and walked alone in the jungle. The baby visited 5/12 locations in turn (randomly selected) and then was removed from the board. For forward reconstruction problems, the children were told that the mother missed the baby and had to follow his tracks through the jungle in order to find him. For backward problems, the children were told that the baby was frightened and lost and wanted to return to its mother. He could only do this by going back exactly the way he had come, by following his own tracks. The children were pretrained to understand "backwards" by acting out an action sequence in both directions followed by a forward-backward reconstruction of three locations. In both conditions, the children were 67

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY instructed to place the animal on the trap in front of each location to indicate the choice of that location. If correct, the trap held; if incorrect, the trap was sprung and the elephant fell into a net. After each error the elephant was replaced on the correct location and the reconstruction continued. All children completing a journey without a fall received a jungle animal of their own as a reward. In the initial experiment (Brown, Lawton, & Day, 1975, Experiment 1) 80 naive preschool children received both forward and backward conditions, with the order counterbalanced across subjects. No effect of order was found so all data for orders were combined. There were two other variables—activity and story. The story variable was the familiar one of presence or absence of a logical connective narrative. For children assigned to the no-story condition, each stage in the journey was connected by "and then," e.g., "and then he went to the parrots and then he went to the lions," in mock narrative style with no connecting logic (Brown & Murphy, 1975). For the children in the story condition, each stage of the journey was included in a connective narrative with a "causal" relation between each series of events. An example of a connective narrative would be, The baby elephant ran away from his mother to visit the baby hippopotamus (location 1). The hippos were catching fish in the river and the elephant tried to catch some too but he fell in the water. As he was already wet, the elephant decided to follow the river to see where it went. He went up the river until he came to a pool with a large snake in it (location 2). He was so frightened that he jumped out and ran away to a group of monkeys (location 3) who laughed at him standing there all wet. They told him to go to the men's village (location 4) where there was a fire and he could get warm and dry. So he crept up to the village of men, but the men saw him and chased him away. He ran to his friend, the lion (location 5) to protect him from the angry men. In addition to the story variable, half the children actually enacted the initial journey with the experimenter, walking around the table and placing the animals in each location, while the remaining children merely watched the experimenter (sitting in a high chair where they could view the entire scene). Children who enacted the journeys performed better than did the passive subjects. Since this variable did not interact with any others, it will not be discussed further. The mean proportions of correct placements are presented in Table 9 where it can be seen that forward reconstructions are more accurate than backward reconstructions and a connecting story produces superior performance. Young children have more difficulty reproducing a journey in the re68

ANN L. BROWN Table 9. Mean Proportion of Correct Placements as a Function of Direction and Story Condition in the Jungle Experiments (Brown, Lawton, & Day, 1975, Experiments 1 and 2) Story Subjectsa Preschool, item and order . . . CA = 5.1 Preschool, order only CA = 5.1 First and second grade CA= 7.3 Third and fourth grade . CA = 9.4

..

No Story Forward

Backward

Experiment 1 87 .70*

.74

.46*

Experiment 2 96 .94

.90

.56*

Forward

Backward

98

.96

.92

.86

98

1 .00

.89

.96

a

N = 10 subjects per group. Difference between forward and backward order significant at the .05 level.

verse order even when a connective narrative is provided to aid them. The interaction of direction and story condition was not reliable. A problem with this initial study was that the children were required to remember both the order of events and the events themselves. Since this is not comparable to the situation in prior studies, and errors in choosing incorrect locations seemed to upset the children, we replicated the study using the lights to indicate stages in the journey (Brown, Lawton, & Day, 1975, Experiment 2). The procedure was the same as in the initial experiment; however, now as the baby elephant entered a location on the initial journey, a little red light next to that location was illuminated. When the children were faced with the task of reconstructing the journey, the locations visited were indicated by the lights and, therefore, the children needed only to reconstruct the sequence of locations and not the locations themselves. The only other differences from the initial experiment were that all children were tested in the activity condition and all received either forward or backward orders, not both. In addition to the four groups of nursery-school children (forward story, forward no story, backward story, backward no story), four comparable groups of first and second graders and four comparable groups of third and fourth graders were tested. The mean proportions of correct placements are shown in Table 9 together with the comparable data from the initial experiment. The only reliable difference between forward and backward construction occurred for the younger 69

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY subjects in the no-story conditions. When a unifying story connected the sequence of events, even the younger children could reconstruct that sequence bidirectionally. When the story was omitted, however, preoperational children were reliably better at reconstituting a journey in the forward order. The pattern of results for older children was unclear because of an apparent ceiling effect, and we intend to repeat the experiment for the older children without the lights as cues, in order to assess the effects of forward vs. backward reconstructions. However, so far our data indicate that forward and backward orders are readily reconstructed by the older children, with the direction of reconstruction exerting no influence on efficiency. In the third study in this series we were again concerned with the stability of the preschool child's ability to retrace the order of succession in reverse sequentiality. Trabasso and his colleagues (Trabasso, 1975) have shown that if young children are trained to criterion on memory for premise information, they are able to make transitive inferences thought to be beyond their problem-solving capacity. Similarly, in a study of the use of hypotheses to solve discrimination-learning problems, Eimas (1970) found that allowing children to have access to their previous responses, and thus reducing memory load, enabled them systematically to eliminate incorrect hypotheses as effectively as adults. The suggestion is that children can perform mature operations if they are not required to depend on memory. Because young children have difficulty maintaining information in memory, any differences between younger and older children could be attributed to immature memory functioning (or capacity) rather than to the inability to perform the necessary cognitive operations. For these reasons we decided to train preoperational children to criterion on the forward reconstruction of a journey and then test for subsequent reversal of that sequence (Brown, Lawton, & Day, 1975, Experiment 3). The subjects were 27 naive preschool children; half were randomly assigned to a criterion group, where they received a reversal trial immediately after achieving one errorless forward reconstruction. The remainder were assigned to an overtraining group where they were required to complete three errorless forward reconstructions before the reversal attempt. The stimuli and apparatus were identical to previous jungle experiments. The procedure was also similar, but all children were given seven-location journeys and all were tested in the no-story condition to increase the difficulty of the task. The data are presented in the accompanying tabulation. The one subject who failed to reach criterion in six trials was excluded. The proportion of subjects making errorless reversals was significantly higher in the overtraining con70

ANN L. BROWN Criterion (N=13)

Training Condition

. . .

Trials to criterion Errors on reversal trial Proportion of subjects making errorless reversals

2.84 .38

... 0

Overtraining (N=13)

2.84 .28 .38*

* Difference between criterion and overtraining significant at the .05 level.

dition; however, even following three errorless forward reconstructions, 62 percent of the children were still not able to complete the reverse sequence without errors. The results described in the previous sections are supported by the findings from the first three jungle experiments. Before the period of concrete operations children could readily trace a series of events in the correct order, but they could not as readily retrace the journey in reverse sequentiality. The final study we conducted with the jungle journey (Brown, Day, & Lawton, 1975) is currently being replicated, but brief mention can be made here of the pattern of results. Although we have experienced problems in obtaining reversed journey reconstructions from young children, their forward reconstructions have been consistently good. Therefore we were intrigued by the difficulty reported by a colleague of Piaget in obtaining forward-order reconstructions from preoperational children in a similar journey task. As an example of the one-way logic of functions, Piaget (1968) stated that even when children understand one-to-one correspondence, they often lack reciprocity, and in this context he described an experiment conducted in his laboratory by Van den Bogaerts-Rombouts (1966). A truck follows a random route through a selection of houses picking up a colored token in front of each house. The color of the token is different for each house and corresponds to the color of a toy man standing in front of the house. The tokens are placed in the truck in the order in which they are collected (the order of the journey). At the end of the journey children are asked why the tokens are in that particular order. After 5 years of age children readily understand the one-toone correspondence of the order of items and the order in which they were picked up; however, when asked to retrace the truck's route they are not able to do so correctly until 7 or 8 years of age. Is the reciprocal correspondence more difficult than the direct correspondence, as suggested by Piaget, or do children merely fail to use the colors as retrieval cues? Since there is evidence that children younger than 7 years have difficulty adopting efficient retrieval strategies (Kobasigawa, 1974; Ritter, Kaprove, Fitch, & Flavell, 1973), we de71

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA O N C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y cided to replicate the Van den Bogaerts-Rombouts study and to observe the use of the tokens as retrieval cues. Sixty naive preschool children were randomly assigned to six conditions consisting of the factorial combination of three levels of prompt explicitness and forward and backward order. In all conditions a little truck took a random route through the jungle and visited nine (9/9) locations. In front of each location was a card with a colored photograph of the location animal pasted on both sides. The child was told that all the animals in the jungle had had their pictures taken and that he should watch carefully as we drove the little truck around and should pick up each animal's picture. At each location the child picked up the picture and stacked it in the truck in the correct order. After completing the journey the children were asked to explain why the pictures were in that specific order; 55 percent were successful. The remaining 45 percent were told about the one-to-one correspondence of the stages in the journey, and subsequent questioning revealed that all but two children understood the concept. Following questioning, the children were told that they had forgotten to thank the animals for their pictures and should retrace the journey and thank them. Half the children had to retrace the forward order, and half had to retrace the reversed order. If a child used the pictures as cues to aid the journey, there were no demands on memory. More important, the backward condition should have been easier since the cues were in the exact order the child had to follow (one-to-one correspondence), whereas in the forward condition, in order to use the cues effectively, the child had to invert the stack of pictures, thus demonstrating an understanding of reciprocal correspondence. In addition to the forward and backward conditions, there were three levels of prompt explicitness. The first was a no-prompt condition intended to replicate the Van den Bogaerts-Rombouts procedure (as far as we could tell from Piaget's cryptic description). Here the child was merely told to retrace the journey; note, however, that even in the no-prompt condition the child had just finished training and discussion about the correspondence of the pictures and the order of locations. In the second condition the child was prompted to "use the pictures if they will help," and in the final level of prompt the child was told explicitly that the pictures were in the right order, just like the jourPrompt Explicitness No prompt Intermediate prompt . . . Explicit ororrmt

Forward (Reciprocal Correspondence)

Backward (Direct Correspondence)

.62

.54

.48 .51

72

.30 .11

ANN L. BROWN Table 10. Number of Subjects Using Prompts and Number of Mean Errors, as a Function of Direction and Prompt Explicitness (Brown, Day, & Lawton, 1975)

Prompt Explicitness None Intermediate. . . . Explicit

Forward (Reciprocal Correspondence) Efficient 0

1 (0) 1 (0)

Inefficient 3 (5) 4 (4.5) 4(4.5)

Backward (Direct Correspondence)

None

Efficient

Inefficient

None

7 (5.7) 5 (5.0) 5 (5.6)

3 (.66) 4 (.25) 6 (.04)

1 (6) 5 (4.2) 4 (2.25)

6 (6.83) 1 (5) 0

ney, the first one was first in the truck, etc., and that they could use them to help reconstruct the route. The data are presented in the accompanying tabulation where it can be seen that the mean number of incorrect placements decreased dramatically as a function of prompt explicitness for the backward condition, but that increasing the degree of prompting was not nearly as effective in the forward condition. Perhaps the observations about the number of children using the pictures as prompts are of more interest. Children's activity was rated on a crude three-level scale of efficiency. The first level indicated no use of prompt. The second indicated inefficient use where the child manipulated the pictures on some trials but not others or thought to use the prompt but shuffled the order—a production inefficiency of the type reported by Corsini, Pick, and Flavell (1968). The third level was efficient use, where the child consistently used the pictures to direct the journey. These data are presented in Table 10, together with the resultant mean placement errors for these children. The difference between the backward and forward conditions is apparent even in the no-prompt condition, since none of the forward subjects, but three of the backward subjects, showed efficient use. By the third level of prompt explicitness, all backward subjects were attempting to use the pictures compared with only half of the forward subjects. The children in the forward condition failed to anticipate that the order would remain the same even if they reversed the stack, i.e., the position of the intermediate picture would still correspond to the order of the journey. Only one of the forward subjects immediately reversed the stack, thus revealing a mature understanding of reciprocal correspondence. A similar pattern of results has been reported by Piaget and Inhelder (1956) in a study in which they considered the semilogical behavior of transitional children given the task of copying the order of the beads (or washing) placed on a line. Whereas the children had no difficulty copying the forward order and could manage a reversed order with consider73

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY able trial and error, they failed to predict that the order of the items on the line would remain invariant through any spatial transformation. If they cannot predict that the spatial order BCDE will remain intact when the line is reversed, it is not surprising that they failed to use the pictures as retrieval cues. Thus we have another example of the fragility of the concept of order in young children who, though able to seriate items under the most favorable conditions, still appear to lack a fully internalized logical operation of reversibility. Again we would like to provide an example of similar semilogical reasoning in order to establish that our findings have some generality. In an analogous seriation task (Piaget, 1969) a child is presented with two flasks, one on top of the other. The flasks have the same capacity but different shapes. The top flask (A) is filled with colored water which is emptied at regular intervals into the bottom flask (B) by means of a communicating tap. The child watches the successive stages of the emptying of A and the corresponding filling of B and is then given drawings (or constructs his own) of the stages of the process in a scrambled order and is required to seriate them. At the transitional period the children are quite capable of seriating the intact drawings, a process they apparently achieve by concentrating on the level of water in only one of the flasks. If the drawings are cut in half so that A and B must be seriated separately, again the child is able to seriate A and B and to say without hesitation which event is first within the separate series (Ai or A 3 , or B! or B 4 , etc.). However, the child is not able to seriate the two flasks together, i.e., to coordinate the two seriations, one ascending and one descending, until a much later stage. These data were replicated by Lovell and Slater (1960) who found that although 60 percent of 5-year-olds could seriate the uncut drawings, only 20 percent could manage the reciprocal correspondence A, with B 6 , A2 with B 5 , etc. Thus there are many observations implying that an intermediate stage of development occurs between preoperational thinking and operational logic. Although the subperiod is characterized by some negative aspects (lack of reversibility, etc.), some positive advances toward logical thinking are made. Children can apply a rule, but their applications are unidirectional and lack the immediate, flexible reversibility characteristic of operational reasoning.

Developmental Stages and the Concept of Order In the original outline for this chapter we intended to include as a final section a map of the ontogenesis of the "simple" concept of temporal succes•

74

ANN L. B R O W N sion. However, the more we delved into the problem, the less able we were to provide such a plan. Therefore, by default, the final section will include only an observation on the problem of investigating the parameters of the order concept in children. The problem has guided our research and will continue to do so for far longer than the brief period we had originally allotted to it. Owing to the focus of this chapter and to limited expertise in Piagetian scholarship, the discussion will be restricted to a consideration of the transitional stage between prelogical and operational thought and more specifically to the operation of order reversibility. How do experimental psychologists approach aspects of development studied by Piaget? The typical pattern for American psychologists has been to show that with clever manipulations of task demands, meaningfulness, criterion training, etc. the child can achieve a level of performance indicative of reversibility at a much earlier age than the Piagetian age norms would allow. Faced with such evidence the conclusion is either that children acquire reversibility at a much earlier stage than has been supposed or that the specific behavior does not require a reversible operation. We would argue that such a conclusion, based only on an empirical disconfirmation of Piaget's age norms, appears unwarranted. A second approach is to consider the defining characteristics of a Piagetian operation—e.g., reversibility—and compare the child's performance vis-a-vis these characteristics. For example, given that the child can seriate, make transitive inferences, etc. at an early age, one might ask how robust is this behavior? Is it truly indicative of an internalized stable cognitive operation? A different pattern emerges as a result of these two approaches. Although it may be readily apparent that the origins of a certain behavior are present in very early life, a truly operational concept, as assessed by meeting the defining characteristics, develops much later. Consider first the problem with the Piagetian age norms. Piaget both overstates his case and is internally inconsistent. There is ample evidence that very young children can seriate on the basis of size (Greenfield et al., 1972) and temporal succession (see all previous sections), and can make transitive inferences (Trabasso, 1975) under optimal conditions. Specifically for seriation, children of 4 years and even younger passed some crucial tests of reversibility according to Piaget's criteria. For example, Greenfield et al. (1972) observed that not only could children younger than 3 years seriate a set of five nesting cups, but the majority of children could also succeed in inserting a sixth intermediate element. Piaget uses the added element as a test of reversibility; for in order to place a new element into a series, it must be related for75

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY ward and backward within the series—larger than the element on one side and smaller than the element on the other side. Similarly, the fact that children in all our temporal sequencing tasks could construct a series from disarrayed elements suggests the ability to consider each element as prior and past with respect to other elements. Both tests, according to Piaget, should require reversibility of thought, as should the transitive inference task studied by Trabasso (1975). All are clearly within the cognitive competency of children younger than 5 years. Yet we are still left with a problem of interpretation. Do we conclude that the ability to perform reversible operations develops earlier than had been supposed, or do we conclude that these early action patterns do not require reversibility? An additional problem is that Piaget himself is somewhat casual in his adherence to his own age norms concerning seriation ability. When spatial, temporal, or size seriation is the main topic of concern, he insists that the task demands operative reversibility for successful solution, which, therefore, will not occur until age 6 for size seriation and age 7 or 8 (approximately) for temporal succession. But certain inconsistencies arise when Piaget is concerned with other aspects of logical thought. For example, we have already pointed out the inconsistency with respect to the recall of stories. When Piaget is concerned with egocentric communication, his subjects choose not to maintain the order of events in their narratives; but when he is concerned with temporal succession, they cannot maintain the sequence (see Pp. 34-38). Similarly, when describing the inflexibility of children in retelling a logical story, Piaget (1969, p. 273) reports that after children have made up an arbitrary sequence and are then shown the logical order of the pictures, 90 percent of the 5-yearolds and 84 percent of the 6-year-olds reconstructed their original story rather than the demonstrated logical order. How did they remember the order, if they have no concept of order? Children are said to follow an order-of-mention strategy when attempting to understand a description of the temporal sequence of events (Ferreiro & Sinclair, 1971), but again without some concept of order this would be impossible. When considering reciprocal correspondence, Piaget reports that children as young as 4 and 5 correctly seriate beads and the level of water in a jar, but such behavior should require reversibility according to a strict interpretation of his position on seriation. There are many more examples, but the point is clear. It is relatively easy to demonstrate behavior said to involve reversibility at an early age, and, indeed, Piaget himself provides many examples. Consider next the defining characteristics of reversibility. Piaget's theory is 76

ANN L. BROWN complex, and again the discussion is restricted to the problem of order of succession. A reversible concept of order should be an internalized, stable, and rational concept of direct and reversed order involving a cohesive system of rules that allows internalized inferences and deductions by means of negation and reciprocity. The early action patterns and sensory-motor conceptions of order have been internalized and incorporated within a set of cohesive, orderly mental operations. If the concept is truly operational, the child should be able to reason that the order of events within a series is part of a unified whole and remains inviolate over any irrelevant transformations; the child should then be able to anticipate the outcome of such transformations mentally. When the child becomes capable of operational reasoning, practical seriation gives way to mental seriation and the child is freed from the necessity of resorting to trial and error or to intuitive regulation. The stability of the system is reflected in several aspects of the child's behavior: in resistance to irrelevant transformations, in the speed of operating, and in his confidence that the solution is the correct one. Consider the behavior of our subjects in the temporal seriation tasks described in this chapter. Under optimal circumstances they can indeed seriate a succession of pictures representing a time course, reconstruct a series of stages in a journey, and regenerate the events of a story in correct temporal sequence. Thus we have demonstrated repeatedly that preoperational children are capable of some operations involving sequencing at an earlier stage than Piaget would suggest. Yet, how robust is their concept of succession? Is it truly operative according to the defining-features argument? The answer to this must be no, for the concept of order appears to be extremely fragile and is disrupted by seemingly trivial changes in the optimal task (e.g., seriating more than one set at a time). The ability to reconstitute a series equally well bidirectionally is not present, and there is no evidence of the ability to anticipate that the order will remain unchanged over irrelevant transformations (Brown, Day, & Lawton, 1975). Although children in the transitional period of semilogic can manage to seriate a series (even in the reverse order on some occasions), they perform by trial and error, the intuitive regulations of Piaget's system; and "one cannot speak of reversible operations as yet, unlike the subsequent stage where the solution is immediate and part of a complex operational system" (Piaget & Inhelder, 1956, p. 100). As Piaget has pointed out, "perceptive or direct intuition and operational reasoning are separated by more than one step" (Piaget, 1969, p. 21). It is not accidental that in the majority of our studies we have focused on 77

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY children passing through the transitional period of articulated intuitions that intervenes between prelogical chaos and operative reasoning. When we began this series of studies we were even more woefully ignorant of modern Piagetian literature than we are today. Thus when first faced with the vagueness of the nascent reasoning of the semilogical child, our first reaction was that our "freak" results could not be replicated. However, not only can they be replicated, but, on further consideration of Piaget's more recent writings, we have found that there is considerable evidence to support the one-way logic of the transitional period. This type of reasoning represents a fairly typical pattern of behavior for children just before the onset of operational thought. In summary, we believe that although our age norms for the onset of certain behaviors are clearly dissonant with some of Piaget's empirical evidence, our observations about the development of a fully mature reversible concept of order are very much in accord with the Piagetian theory of ontogenesis. In addition, we contend that both attempts to assess a lower age limit for the ability to perform certain tasks and attempts to test the stability of a particular operation over a variety of situations are worthwhile. However, we believe that by focusing attention on the transitional period and testing the limits of the emergent conceptual organization, we can achieve a fuller understanding of operational thought—we can "actually witness the spontaneous transition from gradual differentiation to a true conception of reversibility" (Piaget & Inhelder, 1956, p. 100).

Summary We have studied the early stages in the acquisition of temporal concepts by children passing from prelogical to operative understanding of simple temporal succession. Certain commonalities appeared in our data that support Piaget's (1969) description of a transitional stage occurring just before the emergence of concrete operations, a period characterized as semilogical. Children at this stage are able to senate a series of events into the correct order of succession under the most favorable conditions where (a) only one sequence must be considered at a time; (b) the order of events must be reconstituted in the order of their original occurrence; and (c) an immediate test is made of retention. The provision of meaningful connections linking each successive event powerfully affects performance enabling young children to (a) reconstitute items viewed successively where the integrity of the sequence is not obvious; (b) maintain a series of events over longer retention intervals; and (c) even deal with reverse sequentiality when only one series is considered at a time. 78

ANN L. B R O W N Because logical sequences are handled so efficiently even by the younger children, it seems reasonable to conclude that the operations involved in both simple and reverse sequentially emerge gradually and predate operative concepts of time. Logical sequences are always easier to regenerate than are arbitrary series of events, indicating that even preoperational children have some ability to exploit causal and logical links to infer the most probable order of events. Furthermore, even very young children have difficulty discriminating actually experienced events from consistent foils that maintain the integrity of the temporal succession. Thus the constructive processes of integration and inference are important to comprehension and memory at an early age and considerably predate true operativity. The semilogical nature of reasoning processes in the transitional stage just before the concrete operational period is illustrated by the difficulty children experience with the operation of reverse sequentially even when simple sequentiality has been adequately mastered. At this period of articulated intuitions children can apply a rule, but their application is unidirectional and lacks the flexible reversibility of operational thought. Not until the period of true operational thinking can the child follow the course of actions equally well in both directions and hence become capable of using complete operational logic rather than the semilogic of directional functions. References Amidon, A., & Carey, P. Why five-year-olds cannot understand before and after. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1972, 11, 417-423. Barclay, J. R. The role of comprehension in remembering sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 1973,4,229-254. , & Reed, M. Semantic integration in children's recall of discourse. Developmental Psychology, 1974, 10, 277-281. Bartlett, F. C. Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932. Beilin, H. Temporal reference and development of the conception of time. In H. Beilin (Ed.), Studies in the cognitive basis of language development. New York: Academic Press, 1975. Pp. 84-122. Bergson, H. Time and free will. New York: Macmillan, 1910. . Matter and memory. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Binet, A. Note sur 1'appreciation du temps. Archives de Psychologie, 1903, 2, 20-21. , & Henri, V. La memoire desphrases (memoire des idees). L'anneePsychologique, 1894, 1, 24-59. Braine, M. D. S. The ontogeny of certain logical operations: Piaget's formulation examined by nonverbal methods. Psychological Monographs, 1959, 73 (5, Whole No. 475). Bransford, J. D., Barclay, J. D., & Franks, J. J. Sentence memory: A constructive versus interpretive approach. Cognitive Psychology, 1972, 3, 193-209.

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MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY —, & McCarrell, N. S. A sketch of a cognitive approach to comprehension: Some thoughts about what it means to comprehend. In W. B. Weimer & D. S. Palermo (Eds.), Cognition and symbolic processes. New York: Winston, 1975. Pp. 189-229. Bronckart, J. P., & Sinclair, H. Time, tense, and aspect. Cognition, 1973, 2, 107-130. Brown, A. L. Progressive elaboration and memory for order in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1975, 19, 383-400. (a) . Recognition, reconstruction, and recall of narrative sequences by preoperational children. Child Development, 1975,46, 156-166. (b) . The development of memory: Knowing, knowing about knowing, and knowing how to know. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 10). New York: Academic Press, 1975. Pp. 103-152. (c) . Semantic integration in children's reconstruction of narrative sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 1976, in press. , Day, J., & Lawton, S. C. Preschool children's difficulty with retracing a journey: A problem of reversibility or retrieval cue utilization. Unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois, 1975. , & French, L. A. Construction and regeneration of logical sequences using causes and consequences as the point of departure. Child Development, 1976, in press. , Lawton, S. C., & Day, J. Age differences in the ability to retrace a journey in forward or reverse sequentiality. Unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois, 1975. , & Murphy, M. D. Reconstruction of arbitrary versus logical sequences by preschool children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1975, 20, 307-326. Bryant, P. E., & Trabasso, T. Transitive inferences and memory in young children. Nature, 1971, 232,456-458. Carroll, L. Alice's adventures in wonderland. London: Macmillan, 1865. . Through the looking glass and what Alice found there. London: Macmillan, 1872. Clark, E. V. How young children describe events in time. In G. B. Flores D'Arcais & W. J. M. Levelt (Eds.), Advances in psycholinguistics. New York: American Elsevier, 1970. Pp. 275-284. . On the acquisition of the meaning of before and after. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1971, 10, 266-275. . What's in a word? On the child's acquisition of semantics in his first language. In T. E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press, 1973. Pp. 65-110. Clark, H. H. Linguistic processes in deductive reasoning. Psychological Review, 1969, 76, 387-404. (a) The influence of language in solving three term series problems. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1969, 82, 205-215. (b) . Space, time, semantics and the child. In T. E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press, 1973. Pp. 27-63. Clark, M. C., & Bower, G. H. Narrative stories as mediators for serial learning. Psychonomic Science, 1969, 14, 181-182. Cohen, J., Hansel, C. E., & Sylvester, J. An experimental study of comparative judgements of time. British Journal of Psychology, 1954, 45, 108-114. Corsini, D. A., Pick, A. D., & Flavell, J. H. Production of non-verbal mediators in young children. Child Development, 1968, 39, 53-58. Cottle, T. J., & Pleck, J. H. Linear estimations of temporal extension: The effects of age, sex, and social class. Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment, 1969,33,81-93. 80

ANN L. BROWN Cromer, R. F. The development of temporal references during the acquisition of language. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1968. . The development of the ability to decenter in time. British Journal of Psychology, 1971,62, 353-365. Descartes, R. Oeuvres. V. Cousin (Ed.). Paris: Levrault, 1825. DeSoto, C. B., London, M., & Handel, S. Social reasoning and spatial paralogic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1965,2, 513-521. Drach, K. The language of the parent: A pilot study. In working paper No. 14: The structure of linguistic input to children. Language Behavior Research Laboratory,University of California, Berkeley, 1969. Drozdal, J. G., & Flavell, J. H. A developmental study of logical search behavior. Child Development, 1975,46, 389-393. Eimas, P. D. Effects of memory aids on hypothesis behavior and focusing in young children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1970, 10, 319-336. Farnham-Diggory, S. Self, future, and time: A developmental study of the concepts of psychotic, brain damaged, and normal children. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1966, 31 (1, Serial No. 103). Feigenbaum, E. A., & Simon, H. A. A theory of the serial position effect. British Journal of Psychology, 1962, 53, 307-320. Ferreiro, E., & Sinclair, H. Temporal relations in language. International Journal of Psychology, 1971,6, 39^7. Flavell, J. H., Botkin, P. T., Fry, C. L., Wright, J. W., & Jarvis, P. E. The development of role-taking and communication skills in children. New York: Wiley, 1968. Fraisse, P. The psychology of time. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. French, L. A., & Brown, A. L. Comprehension of before and after in logical and arbitrary sequences. Unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois, 1975. Gordon, D., & Lakoff, G. Conversational postulates. In Papers from the seventh regional meeting. Chicago Linguistic Society, 1971. Pp. 63-84. Greenfield, P. M., Nelson, K., & Saltzman, E. The development of rulebound strategies for manipulating seriated cups: A parallel between action and grammar. Cognitive Psychology, 1972, 3, 291-310. Grice, N. P. The thread of discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972. Horowitz, L. M., Lampel, A. K., & Takanishi, R. N. The child's memory for unitized scenes. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1969, 8, 375-388. Hunter, I. M. L. The solving of three-term series problems. British Journal of Psychology, 1957,48, 286-298. Huttenlocher, J. Constructing spatial images: A strategy in reasoning. Psychological Review, 1968, 75, 550-560. Jenkins, J. J. Remember that old theory of memory? Well, forget it. Paper presented at the American Psychological Association, Montreal, 1973 (Presidential Address, Division 3). Johnson, H. The meaning of before and after for preschool children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1975, 19, 88-99. Johnson-Laird, P. N. The three-term series problem. Cognition, 1972, 1, 57-82. Kant, E. [The critique of pure reason] (N. K. Smith, trans.). New York and London: Macmillan, 1934. Katz, J. J. Semantic theory. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Keller-Cohen, D. Cognition and the acquisition of temporal reference. In Papers from the tenth regional meeting. Chicago Linguistic Society, 1974. Pp. 310-320. 81

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y Kobasigawa, A. Utilization of retrieval cues by children in recall. Child Development, 1974,45,127-134. Levin, J. R. Verbal organizations and the facilitation of serial learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1970,61, 110-117. , & Rohwer, W. D., Jr. Verbal organization and the facilitation of serial learning. Journal of Educational Psycho logy, 1968, 59, 186-190. Lovell, K., & Slater, A. The growth of the concept of time: A comparative study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 1960, 1, 179-190. MacDonald, R. R. Prepositions in time in English. Languages and linguistics working papers, 1972, No. 4,94-110. Mackworth, N. H., & Bruner, J. S. How adults and children search and recognize pictures. Human Development, 1970, 13, 149-177. Murphy, M. D., & Brown, A. L. Incidental learning in preschool children as a function of level of cognitive analysis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1975, 19, 509523. Paivio, A. Imagery and verbal processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971. Paris, S. G. Integration and inference in children's comprehension and memory. To appear in F. Restle, R. Shiffrin, J. Castellan, H. Lindman, & D. Pisoni (Eds.), Cognitive theory (Vol. 1). Potomac, Maryland: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, in press. Pfuderer, C. Some suggestions for a syntactic characterization of baby talk style. In working paper No. 14: The structure of linguistic input to children. Language Behavior Research Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, 1969. Piaget, J. The language and thought of the child. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926. . Time perception in children. In J. J. Fraser (Ed.), The voices of time. New York: George Braziller, 1966. Pp. 202-216. . On the development of memory and identity. Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press and Barre Publishers, 1968. . The child's conception of time. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. . Genetic epistemology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. (a) . Piaget's theory. In P. H. Mussen (Ed.), Carmichael's manual of child psychology. New York: Wiley, 1970. Pp. 703-732. (b) , & Garcia, R. Les explications causales. In Etudes d'epistemologie genetique (Vol. 26). Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1971. —, & Inhelder, B. The child's conception of space. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956. , & Inhelder, B. Memory and intelligence. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Pufall, P. B., & Furth, H. G. Recognition and learning of visual sequences in young children. Child Development, 1966, 37, 827-836. Ritter, K., Kaprove, B. H., Fitch, J. P., & Flavell, J. H. The development of retrieval strategies in young children. Cognitive Psychology, 1973, 5, 310-321. Rohwer, W. D., Jr. Elaboration and learning in childhood and adolescence. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 8). New York: Academic Press, 1973. Rumelhart, D. E. Notes on a schema for stories. In D. Bobrow & A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science. New York: Academic Press, 1975. Pp. 211-236. Sakade, F. How to fool a cat. In F. Sakade (Ed.), Japanese children's stones. Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1959.

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ANN L. BROWN Shatz, M., & Gelman, R. The development of communication skills: Modifications in the speech of young children as a function of the listener. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1973, 38 (5, Serial No. 152). Snow, C. E. Mother's speech to children learning language. Child Development, 1972, 43, 549-565. Stein, N. L., & Glenn, C. G. The developmental study of children's recall of story material. Paper presented at the Society for Research in Child Development meeting, Denver, 1975. Trabasso, T. Representation, memory, and reasoning: How do we make transitive inferences. In A. D. Pick (Ed.), Minnesota symposia on child psychology (Vol. 9). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975. , & Riley, C. A. On the construction and use of representation involving linear order. In R. L. Solso (Ed.), Information processing and cognition: The Loyola Symposium. Hillsdale, N.Y.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, in press. , Riley, C. A., & Wilson, E. G. The representation of linear order and spatial strategies in reasoning: A developmental study. In R. Flamagne (Ed.), Psychological studies of logic and its development. Hillsdale, N.Y.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, in press. Van den Bogaerts-Rombouts, N. Projection spatiale d'une serie temporelle. In J. B. Grize (Ed.), L'epistemologie du temps. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1966. Vurpillot, E. Judging visual similarity: The development of scanning strategies and their relation to differentiation, journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1968, 6, 632650. Weil, J. The relationship between time conceptualization and time language in young children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. City University of New York, 1970. Wertsch, J. V. Simply speaking. In Papers from the tenth regional meeting. Chicago Linguistic Society, 1974. Pp. 732-741. Yendovitskaya, T. V. Development of memory. In A. V. Zaparozhets & D. B. Elkonin (Eds.), The psychology of the preschool child. Cambridge M.I.T. Press, 1971. Pp. 89-110.

83

EDITH D. NEIMARK

The Natural History of Spontaneous Mnemonic Activities under Conditions of Minimal Experimental Constraint

The Problem under Investigation In the work I am going to describe, I am attempting to answer two seemingly simple and straightforward questions: How do people go about committing material to memory when left to their own devices? How does the nature of that activity change with age? The most probable reader response to those two questions is either (a) Don't we already know that? or (b) Why should we want to know that? As might be expected, the posing of these two rhetorical questions prefaces a long-winded answer. Don't We Already Know That? Most persons would assume that after almost 100 years of memory research—and certainly after the flurry of activity of the last decade that has filled thousands of journal pages—experimental psychologists must know just about all there is to know about memory. A more naive assumption is that this is an empirical rather than a theoretical NOTE: No project of this magnitude could be undertaken without the cooperation and contribution of many individuals and agencies whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged. NICHHD has provided generous and continuing support under grant no. HD 01725. Most of the data were collected and analyzed by Robert H. Chapman and Joel M. Kleinman. The public schools of Highland Park, N.J., and of East Brunswick, N.J., were most helpful, especially Dr. E. Leppert and Ann Wallingford of Highland Park Middle School, Dr. L. Ashley and J. Casiero of East Brunswick High School, and G. Kasting, R. Apostle, and D. Colaneri of Roselle Smith and Lawrence Brook Schools. Finally, I want to thank the hundreds of students who uncomplainingly memorized meaningless material and explained how they did it. I hope their time and effort have not been in vain. 84

EDITH D. N E I M A R K question; surely educators, whose job it is to ensure that folks learn stuff, know what they are trying to do and how best to do it. Both assumptions are wrong. The fact that they are wrong could be taken as a strong indictment of experimental psychologists and of educators. Since practically everyone nowadays is engaged in the vilification of educators, I shall confine my indictment to the experimental psychologists, who more richly deserve it. It is a rare experimentalist, indeed, who directly studies how persons commit material to memory (Blick & Wake, 1971; Gruneberg, 1973; Martin, 1967) probably because direct observation is not a prescribed research strategy in the canon of research procedures that we have borrowed from physics. According to that canon, one studies a process by developing a theory of the process and then subjecting the theory to experimental test. There is nothing wrong with this indirect approach; it works fine for physics and most experimental psychologists assume that it works just as well for psychology. However, in order to understand memory it probably would be salutary if experimental psychologists were more concerned about the generality and even the validity of their findings in extra-laboratory contexts. Most of us automatically assume that what we learn about memory in the laboratory applies outside the laboratory as well. I believe that assumption is wrong for two reasons. First there is the testimony of direct experience. If your personal experience is anything like mine, not only do you rarely resort to such rote procedures as repeated rehearsal but you actively avoid having to resort to them. Instead, you probably try to relate what must be learned to what is already known so that it can be derived from a more general principle or analogy. Failing that, you construct some special-purpose mnemonic that is appropriate to the material in question. I guess most people find that what they do in the course of committing material to memory (e.g., analyzing material for central features, attempting to find relations, etc.) bears little resemblance to what memory theorists say they do. That doesn't necessarily disprove the theories, but it surely doesn't bolster confidence in them either. A second reason for doubting the applicability of laboratory findings to memory activity outside the laboratory has to do with the laboratory procedures themselves. Although new memory theories are proposed and old ones rejected at a fairly rapid rate, the experimental paradigms and procedures developed in the service of rejected theories continue to be used in a functionally autonomous life of their own (Allport, 1975; Newell, 1973; Tulving & Madigan, 1970). I am convinced that most laboratory methods for the study of memory not only fail to provide a valid basis for the study of adult mem85

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY ory but also produce a distorted, misleading, and counterproductive view of everyday mnemonic activities. Such "standard" procedures as (a) presentation of one item at a time, for (b) a one-or two-second rate, in (c) a continuously randomized sequence constitute unnatural conditions that no serious learner ever deliberately inflicts upon him or herself. Moreover, such conditions probably provide so much direct interference with preferred mnemonic procedures that the normal adult who is confronted with them has no recourse but to resort to rote learning. The best test of my assertion would be direct comparisons of the recall performance of adults learning under usual laboratory conditions with the performance of adults allowed equivalent study time spent as they prefer. Until such comparisons are available, I can only invoke the indirect evidence of (a) direct experience and (b) numerous observations of tortuously slow learning and rapid forgetting by that most efficient of all memory laboratory animals, the college sophomore. Now, having argued that we don't know much about normal mnemonic activity and that it is high time we did, let me try to convince you that this is an interesting question—especially when approached developmentally. Why Should We Want to Know about the Development of Mnemonic Skills? For a long time experimental psychologists treated memory as a unique process clearly distinct from other cognitive processes such as perception and thought. Nor did those same psychologists appear to doubt that the memory process was invariant with respect to such conditions as level of education, cultural background, age, or, perhaps even, species. Only quite recently have American psychologists questioned these assumptions and, increasingly, abandoned them in light of compelling experimental evidence. We are, of course, latecomers to an area of research actively pursued by the Russians and the Genevans (e.g., Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969; Piaget & Inhelder, 1973). I shall not review their contributions. Rather, I shall take as proven beyond reasonable doubt the assumptions that (a) memory is a process complexly interrelated to other cognitive processes and (b) that the nature of the memory process and its relation to other cognitive processes involves qualitative as well as quantitative developmental changes. Before undertaking a rapid, superficial review of these developmental changes, and justifying my own focus on one aspect of them, it is useful to impose some constraints upon the term memory. For a fuller discussion of the many justifiable uses of the term, I refer the reader to Piaget and Inhelder (1973, Introduction) or to Brown (1975). I shall be concerned only with the deliberate storage of information for purposes of future retrieval that has been the subject of traditional labora86

EDITH D. N E I M A R K tory study of memory. This is the type of memory that Russians characterize as "voluntary" (Smirnov, 1973; Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969). Knowledge of memory development is changing so rapidly that it is foolhardy, as well as premature, to attempt a summary now. Nor is there a generally accepted, unified theory to encompass all the evidence (although it seems to me that Piaget offers a most acceptable first approximation). Nevertheless, from the bits of evidence now available it is possible to project an outline of the final picture. The very young child (under 3 years) lacks voluntary memory: at this age memory is undifferentiated from other cognitive processes such as perception (Appel, Cooper, McCarrell, Sims-Knight, Yussen, & Flavell, 1972). Its subsequent differentiation is marked by such features as development of intent to remember and careful attention to the material (Istomina, 1975). Once the differentiation of voluntary memory has begun, the child begins to apply available cognitive skills and to refine them for mnemonic purposes. These early developments undergo additional refinement during the preschool and early school years along with an increase in understanding of individual memory limitations and of factors affecting memory performance —knowledge that Flavell (Flavell & Wellman, 1976) subsumes under the rubric "metamemory." So far as we now know, the early mnemonic devices seem limited to rehearsal (Hagen, 1971), grouping (Belmont & Butterfield, 1971), or capitalizing on fortuitous features such as acoustic similarities (Bach & Underwood, 1970). If it is at all meaningful to speak of a mnemonic code, then the code is largely an iconic one requiring little or no transformation of the original input (Lehman & Goodnow, 1972). One powerful mechanism of transformation for mnemonic coding is clustering, or categorizing, which has been studied extensively in children since the early work of Bousfield, Esterson, and Whitmarsh (1958) and of Rossi and Rossi (1965). Since classification is a concrete operation, and one of the major attainments of the stage of concrete operations, one would expect to find the use of classification as a mnemonic technique to be associated with the development of concrete operations; available evidence suggests that it is (e.g., Moely, Olson, Halwes, & Flavell, 1969). I have just introduced a major assumption of Piaget's theory of memory that should be made explicit before I derive some testable implications from it. Piaget treats memory as a cognitive process differing from the related process of thinking in its goals (retention of the past rather than creation of novelty) but not in its methods for goal attainment. In both types of activity one is dealing with information processed by means of any and all available cogni87

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y tive operations. And available cognitive operations—as anyone who recognizes the name Piaget surely knows by now—are determined by stage of cognitive development. There are three major developmental stages: sensorimotor, concrete, and formal operations. Only the last two stages are characterized by cognitive operations in the technical sense of the term "operation" (a reversible transformation). Two of the most general and powerful concrete operations are the operations of classification and seriation. By means of classification one orders material into groups, multiple classifications, or hierarchies and taxonomies; in fact, classification is what any filing system is all about. Thus one would expect the attainment of classification skills to have enormous impact on mnemonic behavior. Through classification one can create efficient and durable "chunks" of information (Miller, 1956), and chunking is, to a large extent, what effective memory codes are all about. As I have already indicated, there has been a great deal of experimental study of the role of classification in memory and in memory development. In most of the studies, lists of n words (or pictures) from m categories have been used, usually presented one at a time in uncategorized order. Memory for these items has been tested by means of free recall. Categorization (presumed to have taken place during learning) is inferred from the reconstitution of categories, i.e., clustering in free-recall. I might point out that the operation of seriation seems not to have been studied in relation to mnemonic activities except by the Genevans (Piaget & Inhelder, 1973). This is a serious oversight since order encodings are probably widely used in everyday practical mnemonic activities (e.g., setting up and maintaining a daily schedule of appointments, chores, or errands). It is also, in large part, the technique underlying some of the coding tricks of professional mnemonists (such as the method of locations or the peg-word method; see Norman, 1969; Luria, 1968.) A more serious omission, it seems to me, is the lack of interest in changes in mnemonic activity accompanying the attainment of formal operations. Formal operations, as the name suggests, are more formalized, conventionalized, and abstract than are concrete operations. Also, formal operations are organized in a more flexible and powerful structure. So far as thought is concerned, formal operations underlie and enable all the characteristics of adult thought. But what are the implications of formal operations for development of mnemonic activities? So far as practical activities are concerned (which, during the teens, are largely connected with school), the major accomplishment is further liberation from the tedium of rote memorization. Just as use of such concrete operations as classification and seriation free the 8- to 1088

E D I T H D. N E I M A R K year-old from the boredom of rehearsal, so, too, does the ability to deduce instances from principles free the learner from the encumbrance of lists. Although, as I have already noted, there have been no systematic investigations of this kind of mnemonic activity among high-school and college students (but see Smirnov, 1973 ; Gruneberg, 1973), all of us recall engaging in such activity and have some awareness of its occurrence among our students. I refer, of course, to the general procedure of creating an outline, outlining the outline, and creating ever richer "chunks" of information. Such activity is not easy to bring into the laboratory. And it is hard to see how traditional laboratory memory material, which is drained by the experimenter of as much meaning as possible, relates to this activity. With traditional laboratory memory material one is less likely to see a reflection of formal operations in its full magnificence. Formal operations are, nevertheless, likely to be reflected, as for example, in the quality of categorization displayed, in the features used for encoding, or in the persistent effort to impose order even where no inherent order exists. In fact, I have suggested elsewhere (Neimark, 1970) that a pervasive attempt to impose order on information is one of the universal identifying characteristics of adult thought. The existing literature provides little evidence with which to evaluate my suggestion. Most studies of memory development stop with fifth or sixth graders (or, at the very oldest, with eighth graders), whereas the developments I am describing might not be evident much before the ninth or tenth grade. The General Approach and Its Pitfalls. Now that the problem and its rationale have been described, the general outlines of experiments required should be apparent. The age range of subjects tested must run from clearly concrete-operational, but preformal, to unquestionably formal operations in sufficiently small steps to capture all the interesting nuances of developmental change. I initially decided to use schoolchildren in grades 6, 8, 10, 12, and college students; later I included fourth graders as well. In addition, intellectual ability level was included as an experimental variable. This is something of a compromise. Piaget's assumption that development of mnemonic skills mirrors underlying intellectual growth is more directly tested by administering to each child not only memory tasks but also cognitive tasks to assess the child's stage of cognitive development. That simply was not feasible with the large numbers of subjects required for a normative study. My compromise was to use existing school records to constitute three non-overlapping groups, differing in intellectual ability, at each age. Intelligence test scores in school records were used. But the schools employed various tests, and since only the 89

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY sixth graders and the eighth graders had the same test, strictly speaking, it is hard to say that a consistent independent variable was used. Nevertheless, the groups varied so greatly that the inconsistency introduced by different tests should not matter. For whatever test or tests the school used, children were selected with respect to percentile standing so that the low-ability group was chosen from the lowest 30 percent, starting at the bottom and working up. Similarly, the high-ability group was taken from the top 30 percent, starting at the top and working down. (For most schools adequate numbers of highability students were available within the top 15 to 20 percent which is in contrast to the low group for whom the entire range usually had to be used.) Average students were selected from among children in the 40 to 60 percentile range on all tests (i.e., they were of uniform average ability). The two experimenters were ignorant about the subject, except they knew the child's name, sex, and homeroom. However, after the first experimental session, the experimenter usually made an educated guess about ability—and was usually correct. The more crucial experimental decision was the choice of task and design of procedures. To determine how students go about memorizing material when left to their own devices, it is necessary to create conditions in which the student is not simply free, but is actively encouraged to do whatever he or she prefers in conditions in which the experimenter can observe as much as possible of the study activities. A second desideratum is to use more than one task to get some idea of the generality of an individual's mnemonic techniques. All college students and all sixth graders and eighth graders performed four tasks over two sessions (with task order varied according to two Latinsquare sequences). The tasks were free recall of pictures, free recall of words, serial learning, and paired-associate learning. For the high-school and fourthgrade groups only the first two tasks were given, in counterbalanced order, in one session. Only findings on free recall of words and pictures will be reported here. Before the start of the experiment each subject was informed of the purpose of the experiment and told that he or she would be given material to learn and then questioned about how it had been learned. The subject was given 24 pictures or 20 words (15 for grade 4 and 25 for college subjects) and told that he/she had a fixed time interval (5 minutes for words, 3 minutes for pictures) in which to learn the items by any means whatsoever (including notetaking); at the end of that interval the material (along with any study notes) would be removed and recall tested. Except for the serial list, each 90

EDITH D. N E I M A R K item of the total task list was on a separate card to permit sorting or other forms of manipulation. The subject's overt behavior during the study was recorded by the experimenter on a checklist of common behaviors (talking aloud, repeating to self, manipulating material, self-testing, and segregating unlearned items for additional effort) and in the form of notes about other observations. On completion of recall, the subject was questioned about his/ her study techniques in a manner based on Piaget's clinical interview. This procedure was repeated until perfect recall was attained or three study-test cycles were completed. A few comments about the interview technique may be in order since most American experimenters are uneasy about the procedure, primarily because (a) it places unusual demands on the skill of the interviewer and (b) it introduces dangers of biasing or distorting the data. With respect to demands on the experimenter's skill, a good interviewer must be forming hypotheses derived from observation and testing them with direct questions expressed in neutral form. This interviewing technique requires sensitivity and skill, and there are large individual differences in the ability to master it. I would have preferred to collect all the data myself, but that was impossible in a study of this magnitude. The compromise adopted for testing school children was to use two male graduate-student examiners, each of whom tested one-half of each subgroup. By incorporating experimenter differences into the experimental design, it is possible not only to eliminate experimenter effects as a source of bias but also to test for them as a contributing factor in overall variability. There were statistically significant experimenter effects for a number of comparisons.* A second difficulty of the interview technique is the risk of influencing the subject's behavior by the content and/or form of questioning. That many children did, in fact, pick up subtle suggestions is shown by their acknowledgment, under questioning, that the original inspiration for a change in approach *Analysis of variance yielded significant experimenter main effects on comparisons of trials to criterion, number correct (in both cases, for pictures only), and for strategy rating (both pictures and words). The nature of the difference suggested that one experimenter consistently evoked poorer performance from subjects than did the other experimenter (the performance of subjects run by the experimenter getting better performance was quite comparable to earlier data reported in Neimark, Slotnick, and Ulrich 1971). Order of task administration yielded a consistently significant main effect on anova of trials to criterion and number recalled for words only; the main effect was short of significance for strategy ratings for both tasks. Performance for words (the more difficult task) was higher when pictures were given first. Among college students, who had four tasks and eight task orders, order effects were also statistically significant.

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M I N N E S O T A S Y M P O S I A O N C H I L DP S Y C H O L O G Y came from a comment by the experimenter. I do not regard this as evidence that the data are biased or inaccurate. The fact that one child picks up a subtle suggestion and another child is completely oblivious to it provides additional insight about the probable competence of the two children. And it is precisely the underlying competence that is of primary interest: the object of the experiment is not to beat the subject at some two-person game but, rather, to elicit the best performance possible under the circumstances. Moreover, it would appear on the basis of most evidence of transfer from systematic train-

Figure 1. Group mean number of trials to criterion as a function of grade and ability level for words and pictures; N = 16 for each point. Fourth graders had fewer words than did subjects in the other grades.

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EDITH D. N E I M A R K

Figure 2. Group mean recall on first trial as a function of grade and ability level for words and pictures; N = 16 for each point. Fourth graders had fewer words than did subjects in the other grades.

ing in mnemonic skills (e.g., Spitz, 1966) that a child's approach to memorization is not readily modifiable.

Recall Performance Before examining spontaneous study strategies, it is useful to look at the traditional measures of recall performance: trials to criterion, number of items correctly recalled, and clustering in free recall. On all three measures of recall, marked improvement is shown over the age range studied. Trials to Criterion and Number Correctly Recalled. Each subject could receive up to three study-test cycles for a maximum total study time of 15 minutes for words and 9 minutes for pictures. This was inadequate study time for mastery of either list by the younger children; only at grade 8 for pictures and at grade 10 for words was all the material learned in three or fewer trials by more than half the children. Among twelfth graders and college students, on the other hand, one study trial was modal for pictures and two were modal for words (college subjects had 25 words whereas twelfth graders had 20). Group mean trials to criterion* are summarized in Figure 1 and mean num*The rule for assigning a trials to criterion value for individuals failing to reach criterion in three trials was as follows: (a) if the difference, x, (where x = number correct on trial 3 minus number correct on trial 2) when added to number correct on trial 3 sums to criterion or (criterion —1), assign 4; if not, (b) assign 5. This device was adopted to provide more accurate differentiation among subjects not attaining criterion. For number of items correctly recalled as well as subsequent measures (e.g., clustering

93

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y bers of items correctly recalled on trial 1 are shown in Figure 2; scores for both measures are shown separately for each age and ability level. Performance improves as a function both of age and intelligence with no interaction between the two variables. It is also generally true that girls do better than boys of equivalent age. Although these findings are neither particularly surprising nor particularly informative, they do provide clear evidence that memory performance continues to improve over the age range studied and that memory performance is a function of intelligence as well as age. In view of the imprecise control over ability level and given the magnitude and consistency of its effect, it would seem to be a variable of major importance. Although this finding is contrary to the popular assumption that memory is unrelated to intelligence, it strongly supports Piaget's view of the fundamental unity of the two processes. Clustering during Recall. It has become customary to interpret high scores on a measure of clustering in free recall as evidence of organization during memory storage. Clustering measures will be presented here along with the assertion that the clustering index is (a) a needlessly indirect measure of storage organization that (b) probably overestimates deliberate organization in recall. A more direct and psychometrically better measure (strategy rating) of study organization will be proposed in Strategy Ratings, pp. 104-105. The measure of clustering used is the proportion of repetition measure employed by Moely et al. (1969). This measure was selected because it is applicable for a variety of bases of organization (e.g., serial, alphabetic, categorizing, syntactic, etc.) used by our subjects. To interpret the value obtained, however, it is necessary to have an estimate of "chance level," and this estimate varies both with organizing principle and with number of items recalled. A Monte Carlo model of chance clustering for pictures and words was obtained by drawing 10 random orders of list items for each type of material and computing the proportion of repetition for each list length from three to n items, then getting a mean and standard error of the mean and determining the .01 and .05 confidence interval for the mean for each list length. Categorizing was the basis of organization assumed for pictures and first letter alphabetizing for words. The resulting chance-level estimates are an inverse function of list length with relative constancy in the range .25 - .32 for .05 and .01 levels respectively, for recall of 13 or more pictures and .60 - .65 for recall of five or index, strategy rating), where measures on up to three trials are available, only first trial data will be reported. Beyond that, especially for older subjects, the n declines and the composition of the group remaining changes on later trials.

94

EDITH D. N E I M A R K more words. Obtained group mean proportion of repetition scores for the first recall trial are shown as a function of grade and I.Q, in Figure 3. Once again, for both types of material, clustering in recall increases with age and with ability level. For pictures, all group means are significantly above chance; for words, only those for bright children in grade 8 and beyond, and for average students in grade 10 and beyond, exceed chance levels beyond the .01 level of confidence. Perhaps a clearer measure of organization in recall is provided by considering the total proportion of each age group that shows statistically significant

Figure 3. Group mean clustering index on first recall trial as a function of grade and ability level for words and pictures; N = 16 for each point.

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M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON CHILD P S Y C H O L O G Y proportion of repetition scores. This information is not very interesting for picture material since practically all children at all ages have a proportion of repetition score exceeding chance—as would be expected from the means in Figure 3. For free recall of words, considering only first trial proportion of repetition, there is an orderly increase from 23 percent of all fourth graders to 72 percent of all college students showing above-chance clustering. At and beyond grade 8, 50 percent or more of all members of the age group show significant clustering in recall. If one adopts a more stringent criterion of clustering—i.e., a statistically significant score on all recall trials—then again there is an orderly increase from only 6 percent of all fourth graders to 52 percent of all twelfth graders (the proportion of college students remains essentially unchanged because they reach criterion in fewer than three trials). Although the data are clear, their interpretation is not. First, there is the huge discrepancy between organization in free recall of pictures and free recall of words. If one were to take the picture data at face value, it would appear that from fourth grade on there is always clustering in free recall, and, one might also infer, there is always organization at the time of original learning as well. I am certain this is an erroneous conclusion, largely because the free recall of pictures task provides a poor inferential base for the conclusion: (a) a proportion of repetition score may be statistically significant without reflecting much consistent systematic organization (see also Mondani, Pellegrino, & Battig, 1973); (b) the nature of the material maximizes the likelihood that there will be some categorization at the time of recall—e.g., when a subject knows he/she has not recalled all the pictures and says "I know there Were more animals" and starts naming animals by way of self-inflicted probe. This probe usually produces clustering, but it appears first at the time of recall rather than during original study. I have tried to show elsewhere (Neimark et al., 1971) that organization at recall is a developmentally earlier and simpler type of behavior than is deliberate organization for storage. Although I am convinced of the correctness of that argument (relevant data will be given in the next section), evidence from direct observation is hard to summarize rigorously. For example, one eighth-grade boy, after having reported all the words he remembered, started going through the alphabet systematically in a search for additional words. Since his behavior during the study interval betrayed not the slightest hint of alphabetic organization (on the first trial he seemed to be learning words serially in chunks of three according to the fortuitous order in which they had been presented; on the second trial he formed two piles, learned and unlearned, and attacked the latter 96

EDITH D. N E I M A R K by rote repetition), I questioned him at greater length. He explained that his father had prepared him with the advice that if he got stuck, running through the alphabet might help to recall a word he had forgotten (all the parents knew about the study and could have coached the children). Although the boy took his father's good advice, he seemed totally unaware that it also provided him with a good way of learning the words from the start. There were many similar instances of this sort; they provide good means of separating competence from performance.

Study Strategies What Is a Study Strategy? The term strategy has been used so widely to refer to so many things that at this point it is practically a meaningless term. I tried but failed to find an unpolluted word. The alternative is to define the term explicitly for purposes of this paper. I have chosen that alternative. I shall use the term study strategy to characterize any systematic transformation and/or restructuring of presented information for purposes of storing in memory. Several features of this definition should be noted. First, strategy generally connotes a deliberate plan; that connotation is preserved in my definition. Although the term also usually connotes forethought and planning, implying selection of one procedure from among a number of alternatives, I am leary of accepting this connotation because it may be too restrictive for an accurate description of what most subjects are doing. An apt analogy might be to a computer program (either an algorithm or a heuristic): a strategy is a rule for transforming information in a systematic way. In prefacing the term strategy with the adjective study, I am distinguishing study strategies from retrieval strategies. As noted earlier in the discussion of clustering, a retrieval strategy may or may not have a counterpart among study strategies, but use of one need not imply use of the other. How the two types of strategy are related is an empirical question that remains for future investigation. Finally, and most important, transformation and/or restructuring are necessary defining features. In other words, behavior that does not transform the material—for example, repeating it over and over—is not a study strategy. This does not mean that rehearsal plays no role in committing material to memory—far from it. Rehearsal is a processing procedure that may be used in the service of a variety of study strategies, but it is not a study strategy as I am going to use the term. I shall use the term processing activity to refer to all forms of processing material for memory that do not involve transformation. Rehearsal is a very common processing activity. 97

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON C H I L D PSYCHOLOGY Why not use the term encoding strategy rather than study strategy"? Although that alternative has much to recommend it (e.g., the natural contrast with retrieval or the more obvious connotation of transformation), it is unduly restrictive. There are many study strategies that lead naturally and directly to a mnemonic code (in the strict sense of a code), but there are others that do not. For example, alphabetizing of words as a study strategy leads to a counterpart in alphabetic encoding (and decoding at retrieval), but idiosyncratic categories (e.g., into "easy" and "hard" words) or arbitrary organizations (e.g., forming three-word chunks) do not. Furthermore, how an individual studies material is far more accessible to direct observation (or defensible inference) than how he/she encodes it as a result. At this stage it is better to extrapolate cautiously. However, it is quite likely that study strategies directly related to efficient encodings lead to better long-term retention than do study strategies uncorrelated with an encoding. Processing activities as well as study strategies will be discussed in the following sections. Both classes of study behavior will be considered from the standpoint of their behavioral development and their relation to recall performance. Study strategy will be examined with respect both to scope and to nature. By scope, I refer to comprehensiveness of organization, i.e., the degree to which all material is encompassed by a transformation rule. This aspect of study strategies can be quantified by means of a rating scale. Nature, on the other hand, is inescapably qualitative and will be described in the context of a strategy taxonomy. Processing Activities. Many investigators of memory development have noted specific behaviors that change in frequency with age. Five classes of memorization activity were systematically observed on each trial of the present study by means of a checklist from which a relative frequency of occurrence was computed for each behavior for each subject. The checklist behavior included: manipulating material (moving words or pictures around on the table, arranging in piles, matrices, or other systematic arrays, etc.), talking aloud, rehearsing (repeating an item or chunk of items to oneself), self-testing (looking away from the material and self-testing for recall), segregating unlearned items for additional effort, and note-taking (for which records were provided by the subject). If there was any doubt whether or not a subject was engaging in a given processing activity, the experimenter asked directly. Data on processing activity are summarized with respect to three questions: (a) Are processing activities consistent over tasks? That is, do they seem to be a consistent feature of an individual's memorizing activity or are they task 98

EDITH D. N E I M A R K Table 1. Reliability Correlation Coefficients for Six Study Behaviors: Relative Frequency for Words Correlated with Relative Frequency for Pictures Cirade

Study Behavior Note-taking Manipulation . . . . Talk aloud Rehearsal Self-test Segregation of unlearned

4

6 and 8

10

12

College

.430** .300* .796** .431** .709**

.625** .224* .526** .385** .427**

.518** .508** .596** .603** .384**

.526* .411* .608* .613* .490*

-.108 .306 .462* .477** .292

.439**

.412**

.076

.091

-.105

*Significant at the .05 level. ** Significant at the .01 level.

and content specific? Do they correlate with themselves over tasks? (b) Are there developmental trends in the mean relative frequency of occurrence of processing activities? (c) Do processing activities help? That is, do they correlate significantly with recall performance? 1. Reliability of activity across tasks. In Table 1 there is a summary of correlation coefficients relating relative frequency of a given behavior during learning of words with corresponding frequency for pictures at each grade level (grades 6 and 8 were pooled for analysis over four learning tasks). Although there is variation among behaviors, with the exception of segregation of unlearned items, there is consistency across tasks. Additional evidence of consistency comes from combined data for grades 6 and 8 where four tasks were administered and, therefore, five additional correlational comparisons are available; at this age level the pattern of significant positive correlations in Table 1 was consistent over the additional task comparisons. This suggests that most processing activities are reliable features of an individual's mnemonic behavior. Whether there is a developmental trend in across-task consistency for processing activity is unclear. The apparent sharp decline in correlation magnitude among college students could be interpreted as suggesting that sophisticated memorizers tailor their processing activity to the material, but it could also be interpreted as an artifact of differential task difficulty; 24 pictures are too easily learned for this group to require much mnemonic activity. 2. Developmental changes in mean frequency of occurrence. That processing activities do not constitute a homogeneous behavioral class is immediately evident from examination of their change in frequency of occurrence with increasing age: Rehearsal and segregation of unlearned items apparently 99

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Figure 4. Group mean relative frequency of occurrence of four study behaviors as a function of grade level for words and pictures; N = 48 for school children; N = 38 for college students.

do not change in frequency with age; note-taking and talking aloud appear to decline; only manipulation of material and self-testing seem to increase with age. The most surprising trend is for rehearsal, which has consistently been shown to increase markedly in frequency over the 5 to 10-year age span. However, there is no developmental increase beyond that age range, a fact that substantiates similar findings by Cuvo (1975) for grades 5 and 8, and for college-age subjects. Apparently, once the efficacy of rehearsal as a processing activity has been discovered, it is widely used thereafter. Among high-school students there is even some suggestion of a decline in relative frequency of rehearsal and an increase in the number of subjects who do no rehearsing at all.* Pre-adult developmental changes in rehearsal activity probably depend not on the use of rehearsal but, rather, on its organization and function. This conclusion is beautifully illustrated by the findings of Kellas, McCauley, and McFarland (1975) in a comparison of rehearsal by third, fifth, and seventh graders. Segregation of unlearned items varies erratically with no apparent age trend; here, too, it appears to be the function of the activity, rather than its frequency, which changes with age—as will be shown shortly. *Number of individuals evidencing no rehearsal at all seemed to increase slightly with age. For words, in grades 4 to 12 respectively (all in groups where n = 48) the incidence was 6, 7, 5,16, 13; for pictures the corresponding incidence was 14, 9, 12, 21, 21. 100

E D I T H D. N E I M A R K Table 2. Loadings on First Three Factors of Factor Analysis for Grades 6 and 8 Combined and First Two Factors of Factor Analysis for Grades 10 and 12 Combined 2

3

Grades 10 and 12

Factor 2 Grades 6 and 8

Grades 10 and 12

Grades 6 and 8

No. recalled .490* Trials to criterion . . . . -.475* Clustering .366* Strategy rating .632*a Notes .133 Manipulation .411* Talk .030 Rehearse -.079 Self-test .055 Segregate .026 Recall time .198

Words .175 -.267 .518*a .746*a -.056 .674*a -.007 .317 -.036 -.155 -.064

.586*a -.491* .094 .166 -.027 .148 .019 .082 .426* .172 .142

-.023 .024 .210 -.028 .183 -.152 -.679*a -.611*a -.318* -.062 -.032

.080 -.158 .270 .335* .291 .299* .607*a .460* .398* .045 .042

No. recalled .718*a Trials to criterion . . . . -.683*a Clustering .408* Strategy rating .839*a Notes .132 Manipulation .610*a Talk .293 Rehearse .018 Self-test .011 Segregate .114 Recall time .280

Pictures .278 -.252 .321* .612*a .015 .578*a .004 .130 -.075 -.285 -.086

.309* -.328* .064 .084 -.050 -.002 .056 .007 .303* .028 -.074

.050 -.131 .304* .446* .163 -.197 -.656*a -.639*a -.518* .117 .129

-.111 -.038 -.156 -.046 .319* .166 .652*a .470* .230 -.120 -.008

Variable

1

1

Grades 6 and 8

*Significant at the .01 level. Strongest loadings.

a

Activities for which consistent developmental trends were observed for both tasks are shown in Figure 4. The apparent decline in note-taking probably should not be generalized beyond the present context since it could serve no useful function for this type of material nor was it widely used at any age. Although the results of a factor analysis suggest that talking aloud does serve some mnemonic function (it loads with rehearsal and self-testing), its apparent decline with age may reflect little more than increasing self-consciousness. On the other hand, the two increasing trends—for manipulating material and selftesting—are undoubtedly meaningful. Words elicit more manipulation and selftest than do pictures, but the developmental pattern is parallel for the two types of material. A developmental increase in self-testing has also been reported by Masur, Mclntyre, and Flavell (1973). 101

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY To the extent that with both manipulation of material and self-testing there is active involvement with the task and energy expenditure, one might be inclined to attribute the developmental increase in both to a common underlying process. That assumption, however, is not supported by additional evidence. One type of evidence is derived from factor analysis. Two factor analyses were computed (see Table 2), one pooling data of grades 6 and 8 on four tasks and one pooling data of grades 10 and 12 on two tasks. Although there is some difference in the pattern of factors obtained from the two analyses, in both analyses manipulation of material (for both types of material) loads on a different factor than does self-testing. Self-testing loads on a factor common with rehearsal and talking aloud, whereas manipulation of material has a high positive loading on the same factor as strategy rating. There is good reason to regard manipulation of material as an overt manifestation of the same process of information structuring measured by strategy rating. That suggestion is further supported by the differential age change in the pattern of correlation between the two measures for words and pictures: for words, correlation magnitude increases with age whereas for pictures it declines. That pattern, as will be seen shortly, reflects the later development of effective strategies for organizing words. 3. Effects of processing activities on recall performance. One clear measure of the effectiveness of a processing activity is whether it predicts recall performance. Correlations of relative frequencies of processing activities for each task were calculated for each age group. Once again, the pattern of results depended on the particular processing activity. Therefore, it is suggested once again that the six processing activities do not reflect a common underlying psychological process. Only for manipulation of material is there a consistent significant correlation with recall performance at all ages (see Table 3). This finding is best interpreted in light of the high correlation of manipulation and strategy rating. In other words, manipulation of material is the one (and only) class of processing activity that directly reflects study strategy; superior recall performance results not from manipulation qua activity but from the strategy underlying the manipulation. There is a low positive correlation of segregation of unlearned items to number of words correctly recalled for fourth graders (r = .34), but there is a negative correlation for high-school students (r = -.55, -.22 for grades 10 and 12). This shift in utility undoubtedly reflects the dual role of segregation of items. For many young children (see p. 113) it functions as a gross and exclusive study strategy that is effective to the extent that it focuses mnemonic 102

EDITH D. N E I M A R K Table 3. Manipulation of Material as a Predictor of Recall Performance: Correlation of Relative Frequency of This Study Behavior with Measures of Recall for Each Type of Material Grade Performance Measure

4

6 and 8

10

12

College

Number recalled Trials to criterion Strategy rating Clustering index

.138 -.108 .465** -.111

Words .328** -.281** .521** .364**

.394** -.362* .563** .416**

.405** -.311* .667** .399**

.486** -.331 .618** .448*

Number recalled Trials to criterion Strategy rating Clustering index

.360* -.274 .814** .525**

Pictures .445** -.350** .628** .383**

.567** -.477** .441** .446**

.327* -.294* .441** .199

.347 -.425* .251 .486*

*Significant at the .05 level. **Significant at the .01 level.

effort where it is most needed. However, exclusive reliance on segregation as a study strategy interferes with the use of more efficient categorization schemes, so it is no surprise that frequent use of this processing activity is associated with poor recall among older children. Other researchers (e.g., Robinson, 1970) have found segregation to be a poor study strategy for college students. Self-testing, on the other hand, is an example of a processing activity that can never function as a study strategy (i.e., it is a rule for apportioning study time and effort, not for restructuring material). There is a consistent low positive correlation between self-testing and number of words recalled (r = .46, .34, .31, .26 for grades 4, 6 and 8, 10, 12, respectively), but there is no relation between self-testing and picture recall. On the other hand, rehearsal— which also has no necessary connection with study strategy—is unrelated to performance at any age. Einstein, Pellegrino, Mondani, and Battig (1974) also failed to find a relation of rehearsal use to recall performance for their college subjects. Note-taking and talking aloud, as might be expected, are also uncorrelated with recall performance. It is always difficult to interpret large numbers of inconsistent correlations. I have subjected the reader to this tedious detail to show that there is no evidence that processing activities can be treated as a single class. More important is the finding that among older subjects they account for little of the variance in recall performance. One processing activity, manipulation of material, 103

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY predicts recall performance because of its correlation with a better measure of study strategy (i.e., strategy rating). Many investigators of mnemonic development have assigned great causal importance to rehearsal or other processing activities, no doubt because they were observing younger children. With advancing age, however, it is clear that processing activities are of relatively minor importance in determining recall performance under conditions of minimal constraint. For older learners recall performance is determined by study strategy. Strategy Ratings. The strategy rating scale (Neimark et al. 1971) is formally identical to the strategy rating scale used earlier to describe problem-solving performance (Neimark, 1971, 1975). It is a 4-point rating scale in which as-

Figure 5. Group mean strategy rating for first study period as a function of grade and ability level; N = 16 for each point. 104

EDITH D. N E I M A R K Table 4. Frequency Distributions of Strategy Ratings Ratiing

Grade

N

1

2

3

32 27 22 10 10 2

12 15 10 16 3 10

4 5 13 19 25 19

0 1 3 3 10 7

Pictures 28 25 14 6 2 1

12 6 9 8 4 1

8 17 23 32 33 35

0 1 2 2 9 1

0

Words

4 6 8 10 12 College . . 4 6 8 10 12 College . .

48 48

48

48

48 38

48

48

48 48 48 38

signment of rating is based on the comprehensiveness and generality of transformation or reordering. If there is no transformation or restructuring of material, a rating of 0 is assigned. Rote repetition is one example of a 0-level procedure; another example is the use of the spatial position of an item (a common approach to the learning of pictures, especially among younger children). A rating of 1 is assigned to a limited local organization. This would include any transformations that apply only to part of the material to be learned, as, for instance, combining some words into a sentence or imposing a categorization that results in a residual or default category (e.g. making a pile of animal pictures without classifying the rest of the pictures). In terms of content, the strategies receiving rating 1 were the most varied and, on occasion, were very ingenious. A rating of 2 was assigned for any transformation that encompassed all the material but did not impose a unique assignment for each item. Most often this took the form of a general classification scheme, e.g., content categories for pictures or classification by first letter, part of speech, etc. for words. To receive a 3 rating there had to be ordering within as well as among classes. Subdividing each of the four picture categories, alphabetizing within categories of words or pictures, full alphabetizing of words, or creation of a coherent narrative are common examples of rating 3 strategies. In Figure 5 group mean strategy ratings on the first trial as a function of grade for three ability groups are shown; data for pictures and words are given separately. Once again, age and ability effects are statistically significant. In

105

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY addition, there are some interesting interactions of ability with material. Restructuring among older average and bright children does not depend on the structure inherent in the material; for them there is a decline in the difference between ratings for pictures and ratings for words. Among low-ability students, on the other hand, strategy ratings increase with age only for relatively easy material where obvious organization is inherent in the list; where obvious organization is absent, as is true with words, it may be questioned whether comprehensive organization is ever attained. Strategy rating increases within an individual over trials are relatively uncommon since no selective reinforcement is administered; it is not, strictly speaking, a learning situation with respect to study strategies. The pattern of results shown in Figure 5 for first trial ratings is repeated when later trials—or maximum rating attained—are dependent variables. Although it can be suggested from Figure 5 that there is continuous improvement with age, the stage-like discontinuous nature of change with age is apparent from examination of the frequency distributions in Table 4. With words as material, no strategy at all is the modal approach for children in grades 4 to 8 whereas for high-school and college students comprehensive organization is the modal strategy. With picture material the shift in modal strategy occurs somewhat earlier. In either instance, partial organization, as reflected in a rating of 1, appears to constitute a transitional state. This qualitative shift in approach around the early teens is very similar to the pattern of cognitive development reported earlier (Neimark, 1975) for Piagetian tasks and for diagnostic problem solving. Ninety-one children in grades 4 to 8 in that longitudinal study also performed the memorization of pictures task as well as a variety of cognitive tasks. There was a significant positive correlation between strategy ratings for the memory and cognitive tasks.* Thus the Piagetian view that the development of cognitive operations is reflected in mnemonic activity is supported. In this instance the cognitive operations are formal operations. Additional evidence for the parallel development of memory and intelligence is provided by analysis of the content of study strategies in Description of Study Strategies, pp. 109-114. Before proceeding to that analysis, let us consider the distinction between *For 91 children in grades 4 to 8 the correlation of study-strategy rating with cognitive task was as follows: .40 with diagnostic problem solving; .30 for generating combinations of colors. Additional correlations for 71 children in grades 5 to 8 were .31 with generating permutations and .42 with number of initial marks constant (the most popular strategy for generating permutations). All r values are statistically significant and, while not remarkably high, are comparable in magnitude to across-task correlations reported for strategy ratings in the present study (see Table 4). 106

Table 5. Correlation Coefficients for Four First-Trial Measures across and within Tasks for Each Grade Separately Picture Measure

Picture Measure Strategy Trials to Rating Criterion

Measure Word Strategy rating. . Trials to criterion No. recalled . . . Clustering index .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

459* -309** 449* 122

Strategy rating. . Trials to criterion No. recalled . . . Clustering index .

. . . 274 . . . -538* . . . 504* . . . 478*

No. Clustering Recall Index

Strategy Trials to Rating Criterion

Picture Measure

No. Clustering Recall Index

Strategy Trials to Rating Criterion

No. Clustering Index Recall

Grade 4 -300** 497* 579* -488* 555* 395* -243 017

613 * -162 242 116

432* -439* 230 299**

Grade 6 -589* 767* 417* -787* -684* 702* -400* 318**

662* -367** 587* 306**

359** -554* 493* 565*

Grade 8 -593* 597* 531* -793* -747* 509* -610* 510*

589* -582* 650* 166

Grade -291** 560* -798* -429*

664 * -383 * 407 * 128

514* -589* 600* 608*

Grade -598* 305** -842* -563*

500* -359** 355** 280

312 -202 110 604*

College -040 228 -143 -857* -731* -305 -362 373

206 -600** 105 175

10 375* -746* 194 464*

12 586* -789* 205 612*

Note-. The diagonal values are across-task reliabilities; correlations among response measures for words are below the diagonal, those for pictures above it. Decimal points have been omitted. 'Significant at the .05 level. ** Significant at the .01 level.

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY study strategies and processing activities in light of the findings for strategy ratings. In contrast to most of the processing activities, a clear developmental trend is evident in strategy ratings. Furthermore, results of the factor analyses indicate that strategy ratings do load on a single common factor, along with clustering scores and manipulation of material for all tasks (four instead of two in the pooled data for grades 6 and 8) and at both ages. Thus in contrast to most processing activities, a single underlying factor (of organization) seems to be involved, and strategy rating appears to be the best single measure of it. This conclusion is supported not only by the magnitude of the factor loadings obtained (See Table 2) but also by a variety of other evidence. In most research on memory development some measure of clustering in free recall has been used as an index of organization at the time of storage. The strategy rating is by its very nature a more direct measure of organization for storage than is the clustering index, to which it is also preferable on psychometric grounds. With respect to reliability across tasks, correlations for strategy ratings obtained for grades 4 to 12 range from .345 to .468, which are low but statistically significant; comparable correlations for clustering range from .092 to .248, none of which are statistically significant. Similarly, in comparing the magnitude of correlations of each of these measures with measures of recall performance, the r value is invariably higher for strategy rating than for the clustering index. Thus of the two measures of organization, strategy rating is the better predictor of recall performance. Relevant correlation values are shown in Table 5. The nonsignificant rs relating strategy rating with recall performance on pictures for college students are attributable to the lack of variation in strategy rating at that level. For the more challenging verbal material, on the other hand, strategy rating is significantly correlated with recall performance. By way of contrast, Barrett, Maier, Ekstrand, and Pellegrino (1975) also found no significant correlation of clustering with recall performance for college students given verbal material under a variety of conditions. In a final comparison of strategy rating with clustering index, the former seems to be less subject to bias as a measure of organization for memory storage. In the contingency tables shown in Table 6, subjects are dichotomized into organizers or nonorganizers on the basis of both clustering and strategy criteria. An individual is classed as an organizer if his or her proportion of repetition score is significantly higher than chance. Subjects with a rating of 2 or 3 are classed as organizers, whereas those with ratings of 0 or 1 are not. Frequencies in the upper-left and lower-right quadrants reflect coincidence of 108

EDITH D. N E I M A R K Table 6. Contingency Tables for Each Grade Showing Number of Individuals Classed as Organizers on the Basis of Clustering Index and Strategy Rating Strategy Rating

Strategy Rating

Strategy Rating

0 or 1

0 or 1

0 or 1

2 or 3

Grade 4 Nonsignificant PR Significant PR

17 23

Nonsignificant PR Significant PR

7 10

2 or 3

Grade 8

Grade 6 0 10

3 5

22 14

2 29

6 6

Grade 10

2 or 3

13 16

College

Grade 12 5 31

2 17

2 1

5 24

Note: Two subjects were unclassifiable at grade 6, one at college; there are no PR data for five college subjects.

classification; frequencies on the counterdiagonal reflect disagreement. At the fourth-grade level almost half of all children who qualify as organizers on the basis of recall clustering fail to do so on the basis of strategy rating. Although the number of "false positives" declines with age, the number of individuals with strategy ratings of 2 or 3 who do not have significant proportion of repetition scores, on the other hand, is low at all ages and may be attributable to scoring proportion of repetition by the experimenter with respect to a different organizing scheme than was used by the subject. Description of Study Strategies. 1. Strategy taxonomy. To date, we have directly observed over 300 individuals during study and recall and have found considerable diversity, both within and across individuals. This diversity is not adequately explained by any extant theory of memory nor is the diversity adequately summarized by any short description or tally. The single clear generalization one can make is that subjects did not just sit there; they did something, or a great variety of things, and they burnt up a number of calories of energy in the course of this activity. Younger and generally brighter children often literally worked at memorizing. The most memorable example, perhaps, was a bright sixth grader who sat rocking sideward in his chair as he repeated animal names at a sound level just below shouting, as though all his effort would serve to hammer the material into his memory. Another aspect of diversity related to the ease with which individuals invented and used a study strategy. Some subjects tried one procedure after another, whereas others seemed to hit on a strategy quite quickly and adhere to it thereafter; still other subjects came up with good ideas but were not able to execute 109

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Table 7. Qualitative and Developmental Hierarchy of Strategy Classification I. No transformation of material or rote rehearsal II. Arbitrary or fortuitous de facto ordering

A. Spatial ordering 1 . Position in array presented 2. S imposed array B. Learning by parts C. Serializing 1 . Chunks of n successive items 2. Accumulative chunking III. Thematic ordering A. Nonsense paralog of first letters B. Make up sentences C. Make up story D. Creation of scenes or images IV. Classification into categories A. Two or three gross (generally idiosyncratic) categories B. Pairs of items C. Taxonomic categories D. Parts of speech E. Alphabetic categories 1 . First-letter categories 2. Complete alphabetizing

them proficiently. In general, it seemed that the subjects' skill in devising and executing strategies increased with age and intellectual ability. Unfortunately I have not been able to devise any direct measure of these aspects of spontaneous mnemonic strategies. The general content of study strategies, on the other hand, is more amenable to summary and gross classification. A classification scheme that encompasses all observed instances for both types of free recall material is given in Table 7; relative frequency of occurrence of strategies within some of the classification categories as a function of age is shown in Figure 6. A word of caution concerning interpretation of the y axis of Figure 6 is in order. It is a simple matter to count the number of instances of occurrence of a given strategy over the entire session for a group of subjects; if a given individual uses a strategy at any time during study, he/she receives a count of 1. If each individual used exactly one strategy for each task, then dividing the number of instances by the number of subjects would provide a meaningful relative frequency. However, many individuals used more than one strategy;variation in number attempted is further confounded by variation in trials to criterion. Although the total number of observed instances over all individuals and classes would be a better divisor, its use would make computation very tedious and time110

EDITH D. N E I M A R K consuming. The solution adopted was to use the number of subjects as a constant divisor for all relative frequencies despite the fact that resulting values are overestimates (the sums exceed unity). The relative frequencies of Figure 6, therefore, should be interpreted relative to each other. The lowest order in the classification of Table 6 is rote memorization of material untransformed in any way. This "strategy" is reflected in the absence of systematic physical grouping of cards and in subjects' reports such as "I said each word over three times" or "I thought about it real hard." Nonstrategic learning is relatively infrequent even among fourth graders and continues to decline with advancing age, as may be seen in Figure 6. The most primitive type of structuring consists of imposing a de facto ordering based on arbitrary or fortuitous features of the material. The common property of de facto structures is that the subject accepts the material in the order or manner in which it is presented either as a constraint on subsequent structure or, with spatial or serial ordering, as a structure itself. For pictures, the most common manifestation of this strategy was the use of spatial position within the array, e.g., learning a row or a column—generally in serial order—as a unit. The verbal counterpart was to create arbitrary chunks of n items to be learned as serial lists. In both these strategies, the subject was deal-

Figure 6. Group mean relative frequency of occurrence of three classes of strategy (described in Table 6) as a function of grade level. For pictures "categorizing" refers to taxonomic categorizing only; for words it includes taxonomic, syntactic, and alphabetic categorizing combined. Alphabetizing as a major subclass of categorizing for words is also plotted separately. Ill

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY ing with the entire list during study; by contrast, in learning by parts, the subject arbitrarily broke the list into smaller, more manageable units for exclusive study. All de facto orderings received a strategy rating of 0 since they do not restructure the material. Use of de facto structures seems to develop early (not only from an ontogenetic but also from a phylogenetic standpoint) and seems to have a characteristic developmental course for both types of material. It increases in frequency of occurrence from grades 4 to 6, reaching a maximum in grades 6 to 8 and declining sharply thereafter as other—betterorganization schemes are developed. Many forms of thematic ordering were used, but this ordering strategy was relatively infrequent at any age, with no apparent developmental trend across age groups. It may well reflect individual style factors rather than intellectual development. Composing a single coherent story is the most creative version of this approach and it was very rare. Most stories covered only part of the material and were used by the youngest or oldest groups. Storymaking tends to be used by bright subjects, regardless of their age. A simpler and more common version was composing sentences. This strategy was more often used with words and generally by brighter subjects. Creating images logically belongs in this category but was rare at any age. Although creation of bizarre or vivid interacting images is often advocated as an effective mnemonic technique, no school-age child spontaneously used it. The few college students who did so acknowledged that they had learned about it in psychology courses (and tended to use it only for paired-associate material). Creating nonsense paralogs of first letters is included in this category, although it shares some features with both the preceding and the ensuing categories. It is relatively popular among college students, mostly for learning serial lists. Since it is a strategy that does not work well for any of the materials used here, subjects who tried it generally abandoned it early in the trial. The final major category of strategies is creation of classes, the organizing principle most widely studied in psychological studies of memory. In these experiments, investigators typically build a classification scheme into the material by their selection of items—as was true with the 24 pictures used here. In such instances subjects are generally obliging about doing what the experimenter intended. Formation of four taxonomic classes was by far the most common organization imposed on the pictures, rapidly increasing with age to almost universal occurrence among high-school and college students. For words, on the other hand, where no organization was deliberately built in, creating order posed a more difficult problem to which many more varied 112

EDITH D. N E I M A R K solutions were offered. The most primitive classification scheme consisted of creating two or three gross categories, generally with respect to some idiosyncratic feature. Segregation into learned and unlearned items, a strategy discussed earlier in Study Strategies, Processing Activities, p. 102, was one instance of this type of classification scheme. It is not a good scheme, however, because the relevant property on which categorizing is based is not an invariant one—or should not be if learning occurs. Other versions used, generally by younger subjects, were dichotomies, for example, familiar vs. unfamiliar or "hard" words, happy vs. sad, etc. This form of categorizing words declines with age from 20 to 25 percent of all subjects in grades 4 to 10 to only 3 percent among college students. For pictures there are no instances of the use of dichotomies after the eighth grade. Another primitive form of categorizing is formation of associated pairs of items (invariably idiosyncratic or based on sound, e.g., boat and goat which happened to be adjacent in the initial presentation of the pictures). This approach was uncommon with both types of material but might be expected of much younger children (Denney, 1974). There was a clear developmental increase in frequency of use of semantic, or taxonomic, categories. This strategy was the most common at all ages for pictures (see Figure 6). Most subjects formed four categories of six members each, but there were some variations (e.g., omitting purse from clothing or putting baby shoe and crib together). Some subjects attempted taxonomic classification with words as well, although it was impossible to develop an exhaustive taxonomy for the set of words in this study. For words, the most popular classification strategy was alphabetizing, either by first-letter categories (which, like all exhaustive categorizing, gets a rating score of 2) or by complete alphabetic ordering (which, like all elaborated classifications, gets a rating of 3). The use of alphabetizing increased with age (see Figure 6). Only a few bright fourth graders alphabetized, yet more than half of all high-school and college students did. Alphabetizing was also applied to pictures by a few subjects at all ages, despite the obvious availability of a simpler taxonomy. Another popular strategy, used only by high-school seniors and college students, was syntactic classification. It might be noted that although classification is a concrete operation, there are uniquely formal-operational classifications in which the organizing property is a theoretical principle or a formal conventionalized feature. Both alphabetic and syntactic classes are defined by formal conventions. The dark upright triangle points in Figure 6 were obtained by summing over all uses of classification into categories (IVC-E in Table 7). Changes with age in the resulting sum show that there is a develop113

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON CHILD P S Y C H O L O G Y mental increase almost identical with that obtained for classification of pictures. This is true despite large differences in relative ease of classification into categories for the two types of material. This coincidence of trends suggests to me that it is a general aspect of cognitive development that is reflected rather than a context-specific trend in performance. 2. Comparison with other evidence. There is very little relevant evidence on preferred mnemonics with which to compare the present findings. Upon first examination, it might appear that there should be some similarity between strategies used here and the sortings observed by investigators using the Mandler procedure (Mandler & Stephens, 1967; Lange & Hultsch, 1970; Liberty & Ornstein, 1973; Lange & Jackson, 1974). Unfortunately, these investigators take as their dependent variable number rather than type of sorting classes used. Furthermore, subjects sort until they have attained a stable scheme, and their memory is then tested. How they would sort spontaneously after instructions to memorize may or may not be inferable from such a procedure; at present there is no basis for answering that question. Lange and Jackson report that adults tend to use a single ordering principle whereas children are more likely to use a collection of them. This is in accord with our findings on the development of organization. The only other relevant evidence is from verbal reports of college students. Without actually administering a free-recall task to their college subjects, Blick and Waite (1971) asked the subjects to describe the strategy they would use in learning words for free recall. Although first-letter strategies were most popular, they were listed by only 34 percent of the group; rote repetition was second at 21 percent, and thematic organization was reported by only 6 percent of the group. When Boltwood and Blick (1970) presented a list of 19 words to be learned in 7 minutes, 38 percent of their subjects reported use of a first-letter strategy, 31 percent reported conceptual categorizing, 22 percent thematic organizing, and only 6 percent reported rote rehearsal. Those values are closely comparable to ours as are the values reported by Roberts (1968) for report of mnemonics used by college women learning 36 words (six each, beginning with one of six letters) presented for 10 trials under constrained conditions: 96 percent used classification and of these, 66 percent classified by first letter. Thus it would appear that adults attempt to categorize by whatever principle is most accessible; if none is obvious they resort to using the structural features of the word itself. Barrett et al. (1975) presented material in which several types of organizing principles were equally applicable. Although these researchers did not question subjects about their 114

EDITH D. N E I M A R K strategies, they did report clustering in recall according to several ordering principles. They found (a) much more clustering with respect to alphabetic than to spatial order in immediate recall and (b) alphabetic clustering was maintained in delayed recall whereas spatial clustering was not. Thus, none of the available evidence seems to contradict the hierarchy proposed in Table 7. 3. Why should strategy development take so long? If Piaget is correct that memory is an aspect of intelligence, then behavior in a seminaturalistic situation in which information is to be committed to memory should be characteristic of the developmental course for other aspects of intelligence. The evidence presented here provides clear proof of that prediction, not only with respect to the effect of chronological age, but also with respect to the consistent independent effect of intelligence. Since formal operations constitute the final stage of intellectual development, there should be a formal operational stage in mnemonic development. It is, nonetheless, a bit surprising that such is the case. To the extent that the final stages of mnemonic development result from invention and application of comprehensive strategies involving the concrete operations of classification and seriation, one might expect to find little qualitative change in performance after attainment of concrete operations. What additional developments are involved? There are higher level classifications, e.g., use of alphabetizing and syntactic organizations, both of which develop late (as noted earlier). But this can't be the whole story. In all literate cultures the alphabet is taught, and mastered, at the beginning of concrete operations; formal instruction in syntax comes later but is still well within the period of concrete operations. People clearly have the requisite components for mnemonic organization long before they begin to use them spontaneously. There must be some additional factor, perhaps functioning as a catalyst, that causes the individual to use his or her available skills. That catalytic factor is the shift in orientation which accompanies, and characterizes, the development of formal operations. Piaget characterizes the formal-operational orientation as "hypothetico-deductive thought"; Goldstein (1959) and Blank (1973) call it "abstract attitude"; I have described it as deliberate ordering of experience (Neimark, 1970). Its development is reflected not only in a more analytic approach to tasks but also in increasing detachment and accuracy in the assessment of one's own abilities and limitations. With respect to memory development during formal operations, accurate self-assessment leads to appreciation of the finite character of personal storage space, of the increasing demands upon it, and of the economies gained by efficient mnemonic strategies. An analytic 115

MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY orientation to tasks leads to treating memory tasks in the same fashion as one does any other problem-solving tasks, i.e., as particular instances of a general class of situations for which one has some all-purpose solutions, or algorithms. These algorithms take the form of general study strategies (e.g., organizing into classes) which are modified to fit the task at hand (e.g., by selecting the appropriate property for classification of this particular material). To the extent that one can use an existing taxonomy or a universal law as an organizing principle, one obviates the need for memorizing. Subsuming new material into an existing schema leads not only to greater economy in memory storage but also to more reliable retrieval. An example of the development of a formal operations orientation in the present study is an increased use among adolescents of a taxonomic classification for learning pictures (as contrasted with organization based on specific features such as spatial position or a learned vs. unlearned dichotomy). Similarly, the use of orthographic or syntactic features provides a general scheme for classification of words in the absence of appropriate semantic features on which to base a classification. If, as I have tried to show, this behavior is reflective of, and uniquely dependent upon, the development of formal operations, then it is understandable why memory development takes so long. References Allport, D. A. The state of cognitive psychology. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1975, 27, 141-152. Appel, L. F., Cooper, R. G., McCarrell, N., Sims-Knight, J., Yussen, S. R., & Flavell, J. H. The development of the distinction between perceiving and memorizing. Child Development, 1972,43, 1365-1381. Bach, M., & Underwood, B. J. Developmental changes in memory attributes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1970, 61, 292-296. Barrett, R., Maier, W., Ekstrand, B. R., & Pellegrino, J. W. Effects of experimenter-imposed organization on long term forgetting. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Learning and Memory, 1975, 104, 480-490. Belmont, J. M., & Butterfield, E. C. What the development of short-term memory is. Human Development, 1971, 14, 236-248. Blank, M. Teaching learning in the preschool. Columbus, Ohio: Charles Merrill, 1973. Blick, K. A., & Waite, C. J. A survey of mnemonic techniques used by college students in free-recall learning. Psychological Reports, 1971, 29, 76-78. Boltwood, C. E., & Blick, K. A. The delineation and application of two mnemonic techniques. Psychonomic Science, 1970, 20, 339-341. Bousfield, W. A., Esterson, S., & Whitmarsh, G. A. A study of developmental changes in conceptual and perceptual associative clustering. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1958, 92, 95-102. Brown, A. The development of memory: Knowing, knowing about knowing, and know-

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EDITH D. N E I M A R K ing how to know. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior. Vol. 10. New York: Academic Press, 1975. Cuvo, A. J. Developmental differences in rehearsal and free recall. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1975, 19, 265-278. Denney, N. W. Evidence for developmental changes in categorization criteria for children and adults. Human Development, 1974, 17, 41-53. Einstein, G. O., Pellegrino, J. W., Mondani, M. S., & Battig, W. F. Free-recall performance as a function of overt rehearsal frequency. Jo urnal of Experimental Psychology, 1974, 103,440-449. Flavell, J. H., & Wellman, H. M. Metamemory. In R. V. Kail & J. W. Hagen (Eds.), Perspectives in the development of memory and cognition. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates, 1976. Goldstein, K. Functional disturbances in brain damage. In S. Arieti (Ed.), American handbook of psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1959. Gruneberg, M. M. The role of memorization techniques in final examination preparation —a study of psychology students. Educational Research, 1973, 15, 134-139. Hagen, J. W. Some thoughts on how children learn to remember. Human Development, 1971, 14, 262-271. Istomina, Z. M. The development of voluntary memory in pre-school age children. Soviet Psychology, 1975 (summer) 13, 5-64. Kellas, G., McCauley, C., & McFarland, C. E. Developmental aspects of storage and retrieval. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1975, 19, 59-62. Lange, G. W., & Hultsch, D. F. The development of free-classification and free recall in children. Developmental Psychology, 1970, 3, 408. , & Jackson, P. Personal organization in children's free recall. Child Development, 1974,45, 1060-1067. Lehman, E. B., & Goodnow, J. J. Memory for rhythmic series: Age changes in accuracy and number coding. Developmental Psychology, 1972, 6, 363. Liberty, C., & Ornstein, P. A. Age differences in organization and recall: The effects of training in categorization. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1973, 15, 169186. Luria, A. R. The mind of a mnemonist. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Mandler, G., & Stephens, D. The development of free and constrained conceptualization and subsequent visual memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1967, 5, 86-93. Martin, C. J. Associative learning strategies employed by deaf, blind, retarded and normal children. Educational Research Series, 1967, 38, East Lansing: Michigan State University. Masur, E. F., Mclntyre, C. W., & Flavell, J. H. Developmental changes in apportionment of study time among items in a multi-trial free recall task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1973, 15, 237-246. Miller, G. A. The magic number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 1956, 63, 81-97. Moely, B. E., Olson, F. A., Halwes, T. C., & Flavell, J. H. Production deficiency in young children's clustered recall. Developmental Psychology, 1969, 1, 26-34. Mondani, M. S., Pellegrino, J. W., & Battig, W. F. Free and cued recall as a function of different levels of word processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1973, 101, 324-329. Neimark, E. D. Model for a thinking machine: An information processing framework for the study of cognitive development. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 1970, 16, 345-368. 117

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA O N C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y . An information processing approach to cognitive development. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1971, 33, 516-528. . Longitudinal development of formal operations thought. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 1975, 91,171-225. , Slotnick, N. S., & Ulrich, T. Development of memorization strategies. Developmental Psychology, 1971, 5,427-432. Newell, A. You can't play 20 questions with nature and win. In W. B. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing: Proceedings of the Carnegie symposium on cognition. New York: Academic Press, 1973. Norman, D. A. Memory and attention. New York: Wiley, 1969. Piaget, J. Piaget's theory. In P. H. Mussen (Ed.), Carmichael's manual of child psychology. Vol. I. New York: Wiley, 1970, 703-732. ——, & Inhelder, B. Memory and intelligence. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Roberts, W. A. Alphabetic coding and individual differences in modes of organization in free-recall learning. American Journal of Psychology, 1968, 81, 433-438. Robinson, J. A. Initial recall grouping in free-recall learning. Psychonomic Science, 1970, 20, 67-68. Rossi, E. L., & Rossi, S. I. Concept utilization, serial order, and recall in nursery school children. Child Development, 1965, 36, 771-778. Smirnov, A. A. Problems of the psychology of memory. New York: Plenum Press, 1973. , & Zinchenko, P. I. Problems in the psychology of memory. In M. Cole & I. Maltzman (Eds.), A handbook of contemporary Soviet psychology. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Spitz, H. R. The role of input organization in the learning and memory of mental retardates. In N. R. Ellis (Ed.), International Review of Research in Mental Retardation, 1966, 2, 29-56. Tulving, E., & Madigan, S. A. Memory and verbal learning. Annual Review of Psychology, 1970, 1,437-484.

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n A R T H U R H. PARMELEE, JR. AND M A R I A N SIGMAN H

Development of Visual Behavior and Neurological Organization in Pre-Term and Full-Term Infants

Introduction The premature birth of an infant provides a unique opportunity for studying the organization of the nervous system and of behavior in their simplest forms and for following their evolution during a period of rapid development. By systematic comparisons of the ontogeny of behavior in pre-term and fullterm infants it is possible to consider the problem of the relative contributions of brain maturation and experience very early in life. The level of organization of the nervous system constrains the amount and manner of information processing and the form of response expression and thereby the variety of interactions with the environment. Thus during the early months of life the structure and biochemistry of the nervous system is of greater importance in the development of behavior than it is in later months and years when there are fewer structural constraints on the interaction processes. The dominance of such constraints may be greatest in the infant born pre-term, many weeks before the expected date of birth. On the other hand, the immature nervous system might be more malleable to some types of environmental experience. We shall review some of our studies and those of others who have attempted to trace the ontogeny of behavior in infants born pre-term in order to explore NOTE: This research is supported by NIH-NICHD Contract No. l-HD-3-2776 "Diagnostic and Intervention Studies of High Risk Infants" and NICHD Grant No. HD-04612, Mental Retardation Research Center, UCLA. 119

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y the brain maturational and experiential factors in behavioral development. We shall focus primarily on visual responses since the visual system is functioning in the pre-term infant and there is opportunity for increased visual experience compared with the infant carried in utero until the expected date. In addition, there have been many excellent studies of the visual responses of newborn and young infants with which to compare our findings. Since we have limited information about the neuroanatomical £nd neurophysiological development of the nervous system of the human infant, we shall refer to studies on kittens for comparative analyses. Fortunately there are many excellent studies of the kitten nervous system with particular emphasis on visual mechanism and behavior. Furthermore the kitten at birth has a more immature nervous system than the human full-term newborn infant, but the kitten's system is like that of the youngest viable infant born 15 weeks pre-term. The kitten nervous system also matures more rapidly than that of the human infant so that at 3 weeks postnatally the kitten nervous system is similar to that of the full-term newborn infant and at 6 weeks is like that of an infant 3 to 4 months past term. Thus it is possible to make comparisons between the nervous system maturation and visual behavior in kittens from birth to 6 weeks and human pre-term infants from birth to 4 months past their expected date of birth.

Background The normal duration of human gestation is 280 days or 40 weeks calculated from the onset of the mother's last menstrual period. Conception is considered to occur midway through a normal menstrual cycle of 4 weeks when ovulation occurs. It is clear that variations in menstrual cycles and in times of ovulation introduce a variability of plus or minus 2 weeks or more. This must always be kept in mind in studies of pre-term infants. Biological measures of maturity cannot be any more accurate than this since the measures are originally derived from data that are dependent on calculations of gestational age from mother's statements of date of last menstrual period. In addition, for each biological variable there is a large normal distribution at every calculated age. Thus variabilities for these measures are even greater than those from the mother's dates. These biological measures are useful only when the mother has a very irregular menstrual history or abnormal bleeding during pregnancy and cannot state the time of her last menstrual period. A full-term infant is one born after 38 weeks of gestation. An infant is considered to be born pre-term if the gestational age at birth is 37 weeks or 120

ARTHUR H. PARMELEE, JR. less. Generally infants of gestational ages less than 25 weeks do not survive. Thus we usually consider pre-term infants as having a range of 3 to 15 weeks postnatal experience before their expected date of birth at 40 weeks from the mother's last menstrual period. In order to compare infants of similar biological maturational ages on any measure, we calculate their age at the time of testing from the onset of the mother's last menstrual period. We call this conceptional age though it might more properly be called postmenstrual age. Thus for our calculations, conceptional age is gestational age plus age from birth at the time of examination. A pre-term infant of 31 weeks' gestational age at 9 weeks of age has a conceptional age of 40 weeks which is the expected date of birth and is the same maturational age as a newborn full-term infant of 40 weeks' gestational age. Both infants 4 months later are 57 weeks conceptional age though the term baby is 4 months, 17 weeks and the pre-term is 6 months or 26 weeks from birth. Pre-term infants, though generally discussed as if they were a homogeneous group, are in fact very heterogeneous biologically. Gradually investigators are identifying more biologically homogeneous subgroups for study. Birth weight was used for a long time as a criterion of biological maturity primarily because it was a universally obtained measure and permitted national and international comparisons of the incidence of birth of small babies and of the mortality and morbidity of various birth-weight subgroups. Since there is generally a high correlation between birth weight and gestational age, birth weight is a useful criterion of maturity for studies of large populations. It has, however, been recognized that some babies of very low birth weight are born at term and except for their size have behavioral and physiological characteristics of term infants. This has led to a greater recognition of the biological variability of birth weight and other measures for each gestational age. Gradually normative standards for weight, height, and head circumference for each gestational age have been established. Now it is common to regard infants with birth weights between the 10th and 90th percentiles on these standards for any gestational age as of appropriate birth weight for gestational age, those below the 10th percentile as small, and those above the 90th percentile as large for gestational age (Silverman, Lucey, Beard, Brown, Cornblath, Grossman, Little, Lubchenco, Metcalf, Schaffer, Spector, Gruenwald, & Murtagh, 1967). Each of these subgroups tends to have different obstetrical antecedents and neonatal medical problems that may influence biological development, and even within these subgroups there are great differences in anteced121

M I N N E S O T A SYMPOSIA ON C H I L D P S Y C H O L O G Y ents. For example, viral infections early in pregnancy, particularly rubella, are likely to cause small birth-weight babies at each gestational age (as do chromosomal defects, maternal undernutrition, and hereditary small stature). Thus in the future in order to discuss adequately the nervous system and behavioral development, it will be necessary to identify subgroups for study who have similar pregnancy and delivery histories, birth weights, heights, and head circumferences, as well as neonatal medical complications. At present we have to be content with the data available concerning low birth-weight babies, some of whom are full-term, and pre-term babies of 37 weeks' gestation or less, some of whom have birth weights of full-term infants. There are no studies that give a clear picture of pregnancy, perinatal, and neonatal medical complications combined with birth weights and gestational ages. In our own studies we are just beginning to take several of these factors into consideration (Parmelee, Kopp, & Sigman, in press). For most of the data I shall report, both our own and others, all of the variables mentioned have not been taken into consideration.

Infant Visual Behavior Gesell and Amatruda (1945) and Saint-Anne Dargassies (1966) from extensive clinical observations describe the general behavior of the pre-term infant who has arrived at the expected date of birth and that of the full-term newborn infant as being predominantly the same. Gesell and Amatruda (1947) also described continued parallel development during infancy of pre-term and full-term infants compared at equivalent conceptional ages. These investigators state that the infants born pre-term apparently have been unable to profit from their additional time extrautero because of the immaturity of the nervous system before term. Neurophysiological studies of the development of spontaneous and evoked electroencephalographic patterns, peripheral nerve conduction velocity, organization of sleep states, and neurological organization have confirmed the lack of a major effect of the environment on the development of the nervous system of the infant born pre-term. Although pre-term and term infants examined at equivalent conceptional ages are predominantly alike, in reports of all these studies comments are frequently made of exceptions to the general observations (Parmelee, 1975). The most frequent comments concern the visual system. Gesell and Amatruda (1945) and Saint-Anne Dargassies (1966) describe the pre-term infant of 40 weeks' conceptional age as visually more competent than the newborn of equivalent conceptional age. However, Gesell and Amatruda (1945) go on to say that a 122

ARTHUR H. P A R M E L E E , JR. Table 1. Visual Attention of Pre-Term and Full-Term Infants Tested at Term (40 Weeks' Conceptional Age)a Total Fixation Time Group Pre-term infants Full-term infants Univariate F Step-down F Standardized discriminant coefficient . . . .

First Fixation Time

Trial 1

Trial 2

Trial 3

Trial 1

Trial 2

Trial 3

32.36 20.95

33.50 15.02

21.16 11.27

12.89 5.98

12.54 5.82

6.05 2.57

5.01* .43

6.41* 6.41*

2.50 .14

3.06 .43

.28

-.41

.41

.28

5.45* 1.05 .01

15.08** 8.25*

-1.06

a Mean fixation times are in seconds. The subjects were 28 pre-term and 28 full-term infants. The stimulus was a 2 x 2 translucent black and white checkerboard target, 15 cms. square. It was placed 20 cms. from the infants' eyes. On trials 1 and 3 the checkerboard was illuminated by diffuse light. On trial 2 four alternating 7-watt white lights flashed on and off successively at 1-second intervals. *p < . 0 5 . **p