Children's cognitive triage: optimal retrieval or effortful processing?

Cognitive triage is a surprising nonmonotonic relationship that exists between the order in which children read words out of long-term memory and the memory strengths of those same words. Two forgetting experiments with 7- and 12-year-old children are reported in which fuzzy-trace theory's explanation of this effect was pitted against an effortful processing explanation. The two explanations make different predictions about the relative rates of forgetting for words that are recalled at the primacy and recency positions of output queues. The data consistently favored fuzzy-trace theory's predictions. We discuss the implications of our results for two assumptions that are commonly made in theories of memory development--namely, that recall accuracy is a monotonic-increasing function of memory strength and that recall order is a monotonic-decreasing function of memory strength.