FUZZY-TRACE THEORY AND COGNITIVE TRIAGE IN MEMORY DEVELOPMENT

When children and adults retrieve words during unconstrained recall, it is commonly supposed that words will present themselves to consciousness in decreasing order of memory strength, which means that their order of readout should be stronger → weaker. In contrast, fuzzy-trace theory proposes a counterintuitive nonmonotonic relationship between order of readout and memory strength. This relationship, which we call cognitive triage, arises from the theory's interpretation of recall as a dynamic system in which the influences of three variables (memory strength, episodic activation, and output interference) must be balanced to maximize recall. Because fuzzy-trace theory anticipates ontogenetic variations in cognitive triage, we studied it developmentally. A series of nine experiments produced several findings that were consistent with the theory's assumptions: Children never recalled stronger words before weaker words, doing the reverse instead; the priority of weaker words over stronger words in output queues was observed in the earliest phases of learning in both younger and older children; as learning progressed and children secured more reliable information about the relative memory strengths of words, a weaker → stronger → weaker ordering emerged, and it emerged more rapidly in older children; at criterion, when all items were recallable, the weaker → stronger → weaker ordering was present at all age levels, although it was more pronounced in older children. We show how the theory's assumptions also explain some classic findings about the development of recall, especially subjective organization and serial-position effects.