Questions: Memory Development: Encoding Strategies and Retrieval

Question 1

A 5-year-old and a 10-year-old are both shown a list of 15 words and told to remember as many as possible. The 5-year-old recalls 5; the 10-year-old recalls 11. When the 5-year-old is explicitly instructed to rehearse the words, her recall improves to 9. What does this most directly demonstrate?

• A. The 5-year-old has a smaller working memory capacity than the 10-year-old
• B. The 5-year-old has a production deficiency — she possesses the strategy but does not spontaneously deploy it
• C. Memory capacity increases dramatically through explicit instruction
• D. The 10-year-old uses elaborative encoding, which is superior to rehearsal

Answer: (B)

The improvement when instructed shows the strategy exists in the child's repertoire but wasn't spontaneously generated — the definition of production deficiency. If the deficit were purely about capacity, instruction wouldn't help as dramatically as it does. Option A conflates strategy use with raw capacity; the experiment's design disentangles them.

Question 2

Why do young children perform nearly as well as older children on incidental memory tasks (where no deliberate strategy is needed) but much worse on intentional recall tasks?

• A. Young children have smaller hippocampal volumes and cannot form durable long-term memories
• B. Young children lack autobiographical memory until age 6, which prevents intentional recall
• C. The gap is largely strategic — younger children do not spontaneously deploy encoding strategies on intentional tasks, not a raw capacity limitation
• D. Older children have better episodic memory but not semantic memory, so they outperform only on lists

Answer: (C)

When no strategy is required (incidental learning), the age gap in recall narrows substantially. This strongly suggests the deficit in intentional tasks is about failing to spontaneously generate encoding strategies, not about raw storage capacity. If it were purely capacity, the gap would persist regardless of task type.

Question 3

A child with poor metamemory is likely to allocate study time evenly across easy and difficult material, even when more time on difficult items would improve overall recall.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Metamemory enables a child to predict which items are harder to learn and which they are likely to forget, allowing strategic reallocation of study effort. Without this self-knowledge, the child cannot identify where additional rehearsal would pay off and defaults to uniform time allocation — a less efficient strategy regardless of the total time available.

Question 4

Infantile amnesia occurs because infants can seldom form memory traces — they lack the neural capacity to encode experiences in early life.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Infants do form and retain memory traces — they recognize familiar faces, respond to their caregiver's voice, and can recall specific information for days. Infantile amnesia results from a combination of hippocampal immaturity (limiting long-term consolidation) and the absence of verbal and narrative scaffolding needed to stabilize episodic memories over long delays. The problem is long-term consolidation and retrieval, not initial encoding.

Question 5

Why does metamemory development matter as much as raw memory capacity for explaining improvements in children's memory performance across childhood?

Model answer: Metamemory allows children to recognize which material is difficult, predict which items they are likely to forget, and strategically deploy encoding strategies like rehearsal or organization. Without this self-knowledge, even a child with substantial capacity will use it inefficiently. The ability to know that you don't yet know something — and to respond by rehearsing, categorizing, or elaborating — is what converts potential capacity into actual recall performance.

Research supports this: when strategy use is controlled (incidental tasks), age differences in recall shrink dramatically. This reveals that much of what looks like a capacity difference is actually a strategic one. Metamemory is the cognitive infrastructure that makes deliberate, adaptive strategy use possible — without it, capacity sits idle.