Effects of Motivation on Young Children's Object Recall and Strategy Use

The study was designed to examine the effects of motivation on young children's recall for object names and early-emerging mnemonic activities. Seventy-two 4-year-old children were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 instructional conditions: incidental, intentional, or motivational. Each child was shown 10 small toy objects and provided a 90 s study period prior to recall. The children's mnemonic behaviors were videotaped for subsequent coding. The children in the incidental condition were instructed to simply look at the toys while children in the intentional and motivational condition were given explicit instructions to remember. The motivational group was also told that they could keep whichever toys they remembered. A recognition memory task was employed to examine the extent to which the stimuli were encoded during the study period. The children's recall memory did not vary as a function of instructional condition. Children's use of singular versus multiple strategies was calculated, along with a weighted summary score giving most weight to the participant's use of mature mnemonic strategies. Significant differences in strategy use were found, favoring the motivational condition. Significant positive correlations were found between the weighted summary scores and object recall, and the teacher ratings of mastery motivation and object recall. Mastery motivation was found to be unrelated to the strategic summary scores, failing to mediate strategic behaviors. The results suggest that when providing incentives to remember, children apparently engaged in more effortful mnemonic processing in order to remember the items, even though a greater number of items were not recalled.