HOLDING IT ALL TOGETHER - HOW ENABLING RELATIONS FACILITATE YOUNG CHILDRENS EVENT RECALL

Although it is apparent that enabling relations in events facilitate ordered recall, the source of the advantage derived from them has been largely unexplored. One suggestion for the source of the advantage is that enabling relations actually reduce the mnemonic demands associated with remembering events characterized by them. This study investigated two means by which reduction in memory load could be accomplished. The first and strongest hypothesis, that enabling relations reduce memory load by allowing one to infer the temporal order of an event, rather than explicitly remember it, received little support (Experiment 1). Experiments 2 and 3 tested the second hypothesis: enabling relations reduce memory load by licensing the "chunking" of separate elements into an organizational unit. One implication of this suggestion, that aspects of events connected by enabling relations would be resistant to separation by other elements, was tested with 20- and 25-month-olds. In both experiments, unequivocal support for the hypothesis was obtained. Together, the results suggest that enabling relations in events facilitate ordered recall not by eliminating the necessity to remember temporal order explicitly, but rather by fostering the organization of to-be-remembered material, thereby increasing the amount of information that can be recalled.