Make up a Story! Assessing Children’s use of Semantic Elaboration in Serial Order Memory

Children’s ability to use semantic elaboration to memorize novel associations of items greatly improves during the elementary school years. Yet, it is unclear whether this improvement contributes to the development of serial order memory. Here we investigated the role of semantic elaboration in the development of immediate memory for lists of object pictures. If the ability to use elaboration to encode new inter-item associations accounts for some of the developmental trend, then training children in an elaborative strategy should mitigate age differences in memory for serial order. We trained 7-year-olds (elaboration group) to create short stories to memorize lists of four items for serial order reconstruction and compared them to same-age and adult controls who received no strategy-specific instructions. All participants responded to questions on strategy use intermittently during the task and at its end. Although the story-making training markedly changed children’s strategy reports, it did not improve their serial order memory. Moreover, although individual differences in the ability to create stories was strongly correlated with participants’ serial order memory task performance, story quality and memory for serial order were only weakly correlated at the trial level. Results suggest that growing levels of use of semantic elaboration cannot account for the development of serial order memory in childhood. We discuss children’s mnemonic strategies in serial order tasks in light of other studies.