Developmental differences in encoding length series.
Children ages 6-13 and college students had to remember length relationships for 3 pairs of sticks. In one task, 4 sticks (A, B, C, D) were used and the training pairs were interlinked, i.e., A greater than B, B greater than C, C greater than D. In another task, 6 sticks were used to form 3 unrelated pairs, i.e., A greater than B, C greater than D, E greater than F. For 6-7-year-olds interlinked pairs were much more difficult to retain than unrelated pairs, whereas the opposite held true for college students. As a check on the stability of this finding, the linguistic form of questions and the number of different lengths of sticks were varied, but the same results were obtained. It is suggested that the previously observed difficulty that children encounter in learning length series in comparison to adults is not only due to a lack of motivation or attention or memory limitation but also to a difference in approach to the task.
D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D003210:Concept Formation; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012858:Size Perception