Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper reports an experiment testing whether volitionalcontrol over the presentation of stimuli leads to enhancedrecognition memory in 6- to 8-year-old children. Childrenwere presented with a simple memory game on an iPad.During the study phase, for half of the materials childrencould decide the order and pacing of stimuli presentation(active condition). For the other half of the materials, childrenobserved the study choices of another child (yokedcondition). We found that recognition performance was betterfor the objects studied in the active condition as compared tothe yoked condition. Furthermore, we found that the memoryadvantages of active learning persisted over a one-week delaybetween study and test. Our results support pedagogicalapproaches that emphasize self-guided learning and show thateven young children benefit from being able to control howthey learn.