A Developmental Study of Memory for Presentation Modality

Abstract

Second- and sixth-grade children and college students (16 males and 16 females at each grade level) learned a mixed-modality list of words under either incidental or intentional learning conditions and were then asked to recall the words, to recall the presentation modality of each word, and to indicate with a rating scale how confident they were that their modality identification was correct. Retention of modality information was well above chance at all age levels and did not depend on instructions to attend to input mode. Although children could assess how well they were retrieving information about modality, there was no evidence that they organized their recall according to input mode. Results suggest that active processing is not required for modality information to be encoded into long-term memory and raise questions about the use of modality as a retrieval cue.