Image Of The Familiar And Examples Of Typical Internal Development Of Implicit And Explicit Memory

The research of implicit memory in the adult literature has been pro- ducing fairly fruitful findings. Less attention has been paid, however, to the children s implicit memory developmental process. The present re- search is designed to examine the effects of two variables on children s implicit/explicit memory development, using the same paradigms as what the other researchers used, so that we can get some new perspectives in the field of implicit memory development. In the front part of this paper, we review the history and current sta- tus of research of childrens implicit/explicit memory development. Im- plicit memory tasks are various: stem completion, fragment word com- pletion, lexical decision, perceptual identification, picture naming laten- cy, fragment picture completion, category exemplar generation. According to test tasks implicit memory falls into two major cate- gories: perceptual implicit memory, which rely primarily on physical fea- tures of the test stimulus and bottom up processing, is very sensitive to the changes of surface features but not sensitive to the level of processing While conceptual implicit memory, which rely primarily on conceptually based or top down processing, is not sensitive to the physical features of the test stimulus but sensitive to the level of processing. Explicit memory also can be devided into perceptual explicit memory and conceptual explicit memory according to Roediger. A lot of experiments have demonstrated that perceptual implicit memory has little change across the long life span, which emerges earlier and reaches mature point at about three years old. This invariance strongly contrasts with the marked improvement of explicit memory performence with age. However, it is not clear whether such a developmental invariance can be generalized to conceptual implicit memory. Two experiments are presented in this research. In experiment 1, we used a picture fragment identification as the prming task. The indepen- dent varibles are age and visual familiarity. In experiment 2, we compared the memory performance of children at two age levels on a category ex- emplar generation task using the exemplar typicality as the independent varible. The results of experiment 1 indicated that both the priming of per- ception and visual familiarity have little to do with age, while the explicit memory was influenced strongly by both age and visual familiarity; The results of experiment 2 indicated that the priming of typical exemplars have no improvement with age, but atypical exemplars have a strong influ- ence on prime that is higher with 4 grade students than with 2 grade stu- dents; Older subjects recalled more items than younger subjects on both typical and atypical exemplars.