Is verbal rehearsal strategic? An investigation into overt rehearsal of nameable pictures in 5- to 10-year-old children

Though verbal rehearsal is a frequently endorsed strategy for remem-bering short lists among adults, there is ambiguity around whenchildren deploy it, and what circumstantial factors encourage themto rehearse. We recoded data from a recent multilab replication ofa serial picture memory task in which children were observed forevidence of task-related speech or lip movements to extract finer-grained detail about how children spoke during the task. With thesedata, we aimed to better understand the manner in which childrenrehearse and the task scenarios which elicit overt rehearsal. Children inseveral countries from 5 to 10 years old were tasked with remember-ing 2–5 nameable pictures in serial order across a 15-second delay.Coders categorized children’s speech or lip movements as reflectingfixed rehearsal of the last-presented item only, cumulative rehearsal ofall the items presented so far, or some attempt at cumulative rehearsal.We found that most children, regardless of age, did not overtlyrehearse at all during presentation of the objects or during the delayperiod. However, children who sometimes overtly rehearsed recalledlonger lists of items than children who did not. Though rare, cumula-tive rehearsal was most frequently observed for list lengths close tothe participant’s demonstrated maximum recall length. Critically, onthe trials where overt rehearsal was observed, recall improved. Thisevidence supports previous suggestions that rehearsal strategy, andpossibly also its effectiveness, changes with task difficulty, and raisesfurther questions about how verbal rehearsal affects serial recall.