Children's incidental recall of colour information

Few researchers have examined adults' and children's incidental recall of colour information. This is an important topic of research because eyewitnesses of an event are often asked to report details regarding colour, e.g, of clothing or of a vehicle. The authors examined how well 4-year-olds, 7-year-olds, 10-year-olds and adults recalled and recognized colour information in two experiments. Each participant played a game in which he or she saw differently coloured objects. After a 30-minure delay participants were given a surprise colour recall rest and a colour recognition test. predominantly primary colours were used in Expt 1 and mainly secondary colours were used in Expt 2. In both experiments the adults and children performed well above chance in the recall and recognition tasks, and there were no age differences in performance, thus supporting the hypothesis that colour information is encoded automatically in memory. This result has implications for the recall performance of eyewitnesses.