Developmental changes in information input preference

Recent memory literature has demonstrated that children younger than about 6 years consistently perform more poorly with verbal material than with non-verbal (visual) material. Four-year-olds were less proficient at recognizing material presented verbally than material presented either visually or visually and verbally (Perlmutter & Meyers, 1975); three-year-olds showed poorer recall for verbal material than for pictoral material (Jones, 1973). The addition of non-verbal cues has been shown to increase retention of verbal material for young children but to have no effect on retention for 7-year-olds (Corsini, 1961). These studies support Bruner's (1964) and Piaget's (1952) theories that the child first develops the ability to represent information internally by visual representation and later the ability to represent information by verbal representation. This shift in mode of information representation is hypothesized to occur at about the age of 6 years. The present study was a further investigation of the proposed shift in mode of internal representation and was designed to assess the information input preference of 3-, 5-, and 8-year-olds. It was hypothesized that a shift in preferred mode of information input would occur concurrent with the shift in internal representation, i.e., it was hypothesized that young children who supposedly represent the world internally by visual means would attend to visual information, whereas children over the age of 6 would attend to verbal information