What causes a memory strategy utilization deficiency?

In a “utilization deficiency,” a child spontaneously produces an appropriate strategy but receives little or no benefit from it for recall. Three studies provided evidence for two causes—children's failure to relate the task situation to their event knowledge or to link the strategy to a second strategy, in this case linking a selective attention strategy to a labeling strategy. In Study 1, 83 kindergartners and first graders were asked to remember the locations of 6 objects (e.g., animals) from a set of 12 objects (animals, household objects). The most efficient study strategy is a selective strategy—looking only at objects to be remembered. Selectivity predicted recall when the task was embedded in a story about a familiar context but not in the absence of this context. In Studies 2 and 3, instructing spontaneously selective preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children to label the relevant objects improved recall. We discuss the possible mechanisms underlying the influence of knowledge and strategy linking and the role of production, mediational, and utilization deficiencies in the development of strategies.