Age Differences in Memory for Item-Identity and Occupied-Location Information

The hypothesis that there may be significantly smaller age differences during childhood in memory for spatial-location information than in memory for item-identity information was tested in two experiments. In each experiment, subjects were presented three to seven items in different cells of a 4 × 4 matrix. They were required to remember either the identity of the items, the locations that had been occupied by items (irrespective of which items had been in which locations), or both identity and location information. Subjects in Experiment 1 were children 4 and 8 years of age, and the to-be-remembered items on all trials were pictures of common objects. Subjects in Experiment 2 were children 4, 5, and 8 years of age, and adults. The location "markers" presented on location-only trials in Experiment 2 were black squares; in other respects the procedures used in the two experiments were similar. In both experiments there were significantly larger age differences in retention of location than of identity information. In addition, instructions to encode identity information (along with location information) affected memory for occupied locations, indicating that item-location information was not encoded automatically by subjects at any age.