Abstract
Subjects were shown pairs of photographs; each photograph depicted an individual trying to remember the names of animals. The individual depicted was either an adult or a child, and the number of animals to be remembered varied from 1 to 20. The subjects judged which individual in each pair of photographs would be less likely to recall all the animals. Judgments for most children in Grades 1 through 6 conformed to a rule in which the principal determinant of difficulty was the number of animals. In contrast, most eighth-graders and college students used a rule in which the separate and interactive effects of the number of animals and the age of the depicted individual were considered.
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Flavell, J. H., & Wellman, H. M. (1977). Metamemory. In R. V. Kail & J. W. Hagen (Eds.), Perspectives on the development of memory and cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sieoler, R. S. (1981). Developmental sequences within and between concepts. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 46(2, Serial No. 189).
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We would like to thank: Marilyn Nippold for her help in testing children; administrators, teachers, and students at the Dayton and St. Lawrence Elementary Schools for their friendly cooperation throughout this research; and Stu Offenbach and Diane Collier for their comments on a previous draft of this manuscript.
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Hale, C.A., Kail, R. Rules for evaluating the difficulty of memory problems. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 22, 33–36 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333753
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333753