Developmental Changes in the Salience of Encoding Dimensions.

Three research studies were performed to assess patterns of memory organization with respect to complementary and similarity dimensions, referring to associations based on functional relatedness and grammatical relatedness, respectively. The first study failed to replicate the results of a study by Denney and Ziobrowski (1972), indicating that there is a complementary-similarity shift with age in the bases of memory organization. In the second study, two lists of target items and cues representing complementary and similarity relationships were constructed and presented verbally to third graders, sixth graders, and college students. The results of this experiment indicated that complementary and similarity did not represent unique dimensions that were used differentially. Subjects of all ages were using similarity cues better in accessing recall. In the third experiment, preference for clustering dimensions was assessed for the same age groups using complementary and similarity relationships as a within-list effect. No evidence was found for any age group to indicate that one dimension was spontaneously chosen or preferred over the other dimension in forming clusters during free recall. It was concluded that a complementary-similarity shift in bases of memory organization with age is unlikely. (MKM)