The general objective of this research is an increased understanding of knowledge structures and retrieval processes in the young child. Our particular focus will be those settings whose events are frequently experienced in the course of development. The specific purpose of the work is threefold: first, to chart the development of knowledge about routinely experienced event sequences; second, to delineate the processes by which this developing knowledge base is searched; and third, to assess the application of this knowledge in comprehension and recall of stories based on the routines from which the knowledge has been derived. In one facet of the research, in a naturalistic longitudinal study with 3- and 4-year-olds, a routine will be established, and memory for the event assessed repeatedly over a period of a year. Other experiments are planned assessing event memory for real life routines of varying degrees of familiarity. Together, these results will permit a more general sense of whether memory for more familiar routines differs in important qualitative fashion from that for less familiar, or new, experiences, and whether age differences occur in the range of 2-5 years. In a second series of experiments, by observing response time and errors for queries about occurrences of episodes within event sequences, we aim to test how young children search their memories to access information about routines, and to determine if patterns of search differ at different ages, or for more/less familiar sequences. A third set of experiments will explore the way and extent to which children utilize event knowledge when listening to/recalling related stories.
| Myers, N A; Perris, E E; Speaker, C J (1994) Fifty months of memory: a longitudinal study in early childhood. Memory 2:383-415 |
| Perris, E E; Myers, N A; Clifton, R K (1990) Long-term memory for a single infancy experience. Child Dev 61:1796-807 |
