Children's attitudes toward products and recall of product information over time

Abstract The current investigation examined changes over time in children's attitudes toward products, recall of product information, and the relationship between attitudes and recall. Fifty-six fifth-graders were read five positive and five negative attributes of a product. The children's recall for these attributes was then assessed, in addition to their attitudes toward the product. A week later, recall and attitudes were assessed for a second time. Results indicated better recall for product attributes at immediate rather than delayed testing sessions. Although children's immediate recall showed traditional recency and primacy effects, delayed recall showed only a primacy effect. Product attributes which were recalled first at the immediate test were found to be least likely to be recalled at delayed testing. Attitudes toward the product were found to be relatively stable. Finally, intrusions were found to increase over time, in addition to being related to initial attitudes toward the product. Implications of these results in terms of the formation of product attitudes and memory processes in children are discussed.

[1]  R. Atkinson,et al.  Immediate free recall and three-week delayed recognition , 1970 .

[2]  N. Mackintosh.  Psychology of Human Learning , 1965, Nature.

[3]  M. Chi.  Knowledge Development and Memory Performance , 1981 .

[4]  Robert S. Wyer,et al.  A probabilistic analysis of the relationships among belief and attitudes , 1970 .

[5]  S. Paris,et al.  The role of inference in children's comprehension and memory for sentences , 1976, Cognitive Psychology.

[6]  J. P. Galst.  Television food commercials and pro-nutritional public service announcements as determinants of young children's snack choices. , 1980 .

[7]  W. Brown,et al.  To What Extent Is Memory Measured by a Single Recall , 1923 .

[8]  Mandler JeanM..  A code in the node: The use of a story schema in retrieval , 1978 .

[9]  A. Huston,et al.  The Effects of Television Commercial Form and Commercial Placement on Children's Social Behavior and Attention. , 1982 .

[10]  Sam C. Brown,et al.  Positive and negative recency effects in free recall learning , 1974 .

[11]  W. D. Rohwer,et al.  Age Differences and Modality Effects in Immediate and Final Free Recall , 1983 .

[12]  Paul Zuckerman.  Children's Viewing of Television and Recognition Memory of Commercials. , 1978 .

[13]  M. Linn,et al.  Adolescent Reasoning about Advertisements: Preliminary Investigations. , 1982 .

[14]  F. Craik.  The fate of primary memory items in free recall , 1970 .

[15]  Dewey Rundus,et al.  Negative effects of using list items as recall cues , 1973 .

[16]  L. Festinger.  Conflict, Decision, and Dissonance , 1964 .

[17]  S. Madigan.  Reminiscence and item recovery in free recall , 1976, Memory & cognition.

[18]  Susan T. Fiske,et al.  The independence of evaluative and item information: Impression and recall order effects in behavior-based impression formation. , 1979 .

[19]  M. Fishbein,et al.  Inferential beliefs and order effects in personality impression formation , 1975 .

[20]  Thomas D. Cook,et al.  The Persistence of Experimentally Induced Attitude Change , 1978 .

[21]  D. Bjorklund.  The Role of Conceptual Knowledge in the Development of Organization in Children’s Memory , 1985 .

[22]  Bennet B. Murdock,et al.  Effects of Prior Free Recall Testing on Final Recall and Recognition. , 1971 .

[23]  E. Burnstein,et al.  The informational basis of social judgments: Memory for integrated and nonintegrated trait descriptions , 1983 .

[24]  Norman H. Anderson,et al.  Effects of concomitant verbal recall on order effects in personality impression formation , 1963 .

[25]  R. Cohen.  Recency effects in long-term recall and recognition , 1970 .