Describe how memory strategies develop, and explain how cultural circumstances influence memory performance

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

As attention improves, so do memory strategies—deliberate mental operations we use to increase the likelihood of retaining information in working memory and transferring it to our long-term knowledge base. During the first two years, memory for objects, people, and events—as assessed in operant conditioning, habituation, and deferred-imitation studies—undergoes dramatic gains. With age, babies remember more information over longer periods. But relative to children and adults, infants and toddlers engage in little effortful, strategic memorizing. For the most part, they remember unintentionally, as part of their ongoing activities. And when memory strategies emerge in early childhood, they are not very successful at first. Not until middle childhood do these executive techniques take a giant leap forward.
Tasks that require children to remember isolated bits of information, which are common in school, strongly motivate use of memory strategies. In fact, Western children get so much practice with this type of learning that they do not refine techniques that rely on cues available in everyday life, such as spatial location and arrangement of objects. For example, Guatemalan Mayan 9-year-olds do slightly better than their U.S. agemates when told to remember the placement of 40 familiar objects in a play scene. U.S. children often rehearse object names when it would be more effective to keep track of spatial relations. The development of memory strategies, then, is not just a matter of a more competent information-processing system. It is also a product of task demands and cultural circumstances.