Abstract
30 fourth-grade children were shown objects arbitrarily arranged in an integrated scene. Subjects were randomly assigned to experimental conditions which presented a sentence without correct labels of objects and their correct physical arrangement. The experimental conditions differed as to whether or not subjects were instructed to focus on the irrelevant sentence. Subjects assigned to the control group were given no accompanying sentence. Attention-focusing instructions interfered with recall and clustering, and the absence of these instructions facilitated free recall and clustering as compared to the performance of the control group. Results are interpreted as reflecting subjects' use of strategies designed to discover relations among the to-be-remembered items.
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