Young children's use of spatial cues to organize and recall object names

This experiment was designed to determine whether children between 4 and 8 years old make use of spatial cues to organize and facilitate their retrieval of object names in a free-recall task. Twenty boys and 20 girls at each of 3 grade levels (preschool, 1, and 3) were individually shown 9 small toy objects (either categorizable or unrelated) presented in a randomly arranged circular array. Three stand-up pictures of a bed, a couch, and a storage cabinet served as pretend hiding places for the presented stimuli. After a brief viewing period, the experimenter removed the objects from the child's view, left the location props in place, and asked for recall. Analyses of recall and clustering (ARC) scores showed significant grade-related improvements for item-recall scores and spatial-retrieval clustering scores, but not for taxonomic clustering scores. Spatial clustering scores were significantly above chance for 1st- and 3rd-grade children, but taxonomic clustering scores remained at chance levels for all grades.