Schematic Knowledge and Memory in Preschoolers.

Abstract

It has been proposed that variation in domain-specific knowledge can explain both individual and developmental differences in early memory development. The purpose of the present study is to test the hypothesized relation between knowledge and memory in 3- and 4-year-old children. In particular, this study focuses on schematic knowledge, or knowledge about objects within settings. Schematic knowledge includes information about what objects belong in settings and where they are usually located. Two scenes, a living room and farm, were created to measure children's knowledge of each of these components. Two memory tasks were also devised to measure (a) recall of the specific objects in scenes and (b) reconstruction of the locations of objects. Children's general memory skills were assessed in list-learning tasks for recall and location memory, and their general knowledge was measured with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The results indicated that the relation between knowledge and memory varied with age. Although the two cognitive abilities were unrelated for 3-year-olds, schematic knowledge and memory were correlated significantly for 4-year-olds. This pattern was observed for both scenes. Further, list-learning was correlated with different aspects of scene memory for each age group. It correlated with location memory for the 3-year-olds and recall for the 4-year-olds. Vocabulary scores were related to scene knowledge, but not to scene memory, and did not affect the relation between scene knowledge and memory. These results suggest that domain-specific knowledge may be differentially related to memory as a function of age, and that other factors, such as memory skill, may also be influencing performance, so that the relative importance of factors may vary with age. Additional analyses examined the effects of item characteristics--typicality and size--on memory, and revealed that size, but not typicality, was a strong predictor of what objects would be remembered (in recall and location-memory tasks) by the children.