Study title

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which secondary memory development constrains the development of working memory in children. Secondary memory was investigated in this study in the context of a free recall task. In free recall, participants are presented with a list of items to remember that is beyond their 'span', and are asked to recall as many of the items as they can in whatever order they wish. Some accounts assume that participants commence free recall by first recalling the just-presented items from the end of the list that are held in 'primary memory', and then moving on to recall other items from secondary memory. In this experiment we built on a previous methodology used by Dalezman (1976) [Dalezman, J. J. (1976). Effects of output order on immediate, delayed, and final recall performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 2, 597-608. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.2.5.597] and presented children with lists of 9 to-be-remembered words that were divided into two sub-lists by a change in presentation context towards the end of the list (either the last 4, 3, or 2 items in the list were presented in the changed context). Participants knew in advance that they should first recall items from the second context (potentially from 'primary memory') before moving on to then recall items from the first context (potentially from 'secondary memory'). This experiment was conducted with 61 pupils in UK School Year 1 and 36 pupils in UK School Year 3. These data underpin Experiment 2 of the paper available as an open access publication (see Related Resources). The data are also available via the University of Bristol data repository (see Related Resources). This data collection contains data from the third of four studies conducted on the associated ESRC grant (under Related Resources). The aim of this project is to build on previous psychological research with both children and adults to provide the most...