Memorizing and copying visual patterns: a Piagetian interpretation

Six-, 8-, 10-, and 12-year-old children (10 boys and 10 girls) reconstructed two visual patterns from immediate memory, while other 5- and 6-year-old children (10 boys and 10 girls) reconstructed the identical patterns by direct copying. Patterns were simple and composed entirely of circles or squares as component items. Four results were emphasized: (a) Numerous errors mady by the copying groups led to the conclusion that memory loss is often overestimated in young children. Since an independent estimate of perceptual encoding errors is rarely carried out, encoding mistakes are often included among forgetting errors. (b) One pattern was both copied and remembered more poorly than the other in accord with a Piagetian interpretation of a conceptual conflict inherent in the pattern design between spatial and numerical correspondence of component pattern items. (c) A memory strategy emphasizing configuration preservation was suggested for the 6-year-olds who made slightly fewer memory than copying errors for two configural scoring categories. (d) Performance in an unrelated planning-for-memory task significantly differentiated between better and worse performers on the visual pattern memory task.