Abstract:

When people are asked to recall words they have studied earlier from a list, those given a subset of these words as cues recall fewer words than people who do not receive any cues. This phenomenon is the so called part-list cuing effect. This phenomenon seems to be alien from the general thought that cues can help to prompt memories. The current research examined the part-list cuing effect of participants of different ages in learning pictures, and also explored their memory monitoring and control. Adopting 3 experiments, we explored the development of part-list cuing effect of pictures, and the allocation of study time of different ages. Experiments 1 explored whether retrieval cues would have detrimental effects on participants’ recall of the remaining items after learning pictures, and Experiments 2 explored the performance of students in Grade 2 and Grade 5 of a primary school, Grade 2 of a junior high school, Grade 2 of a senior high school and Grade 2 of a university. Experiments 3 studied the development of memory control of different ages. The results showed that: (1) After participants learned a list of pictures, the presentation of a subset of learned pictures’ names as retrieval cues didn’t have detrimental effects on their recall of the remaining items significantly; (2) After participants learned a list of pictures, the presentation of a subset of learned pictures as retrieval cues had detrimental effects on their recall of the remaining items, that is to say, part-list cuing effect occurred; (3) The part-list cuing effect occurred in all age selected. And with the increase of age, its amount changed as an inverted U shape; (4) Participants’ allocation of study time was affected by the times they had practiced with part-list cueing, which was different among participants of different ages. Grade 2 of primary school students couldn’t predict the detrimental effect of part-list cues no matter how many times they had practiced. After practicing twice, Grade 5 of primary school students could realize part-list cues’ detrimental effect and effectively allocate their cognitive resources. And only after one practice, Grade 2 of junior high school and senior high school students could realize that the part-list cuing recall was more difficult compared to free recall and allocate their study time appropriately. Moreover, students in Grade 2 of senior high school did even better than those in junior high school. The present findings revealed that in the picture studying, cues presented by way of cross-domain is a boundary condition of part-list cueing effect, while age is not a boundary condition of part-list cueing effect. The development of children’s strategy on allocation of study time had a great change from Grade 2 of primary school to Grade 5 of primary school students, while the learning efficiency had a great change from Grade 2 of junior high school to Grade 2 of senior high school students.

Key words: part-list cuing effect of pictures, allocation of study time, experimenter-paced study, self-paced study, development