Persistence of memory for ignored lists of digits: areas of developmental constancy and change.

Contrary to the common belief that sensory memory remains unchanged across development in childhood, there have been several previous reports suggesting that the persistence of sensory memory, at least for sounds, increases with age in childhood. Because those previous studies all used isolated sounds as stimuli, it is not yet clear how this developmental difference influences the recall of sound series. The present study adapts the procedure of J. S. Saults and N. Cowan (1996), who studied memory for attended and ignored spoken words, to examine here the recall of attended and ignored lists of digit. A developmental increase in the persistence of memory was obtained only for the final item in an ignored list, which is the item for which sensory memory is thought to be the most vivid at short retention intervals.