Effects of Chunking on Recall Across Age Groups

Hannah Weber

Brigham Young University

Maddy Peterson
Introduction

Something that people have always been interested is improving their own memory.

Individuals who were born with perfect recall or photographic memory are often studied in

wonder and amazement and people only wish that they too posessed such a gift. Thankfully,

thorough a few foundational (Allen & Coyne 1989; Rosner, 1971) and many contemporary

studies (Isbilen et al., 2022; Lu et al., 2022; Huffman et al., 2001) that have looked at recall

improvement, one such method of chunking has been found to help significantly (Huffman et al.,

2001; Jones & Macken, 2018). Interestingly, many studies, both contemporary and foundational,

have been interested in studying recall and chunking across age groups (Rosner, 1971; Allen &

Coyne, 1989; Naveh-Banjamin et al., 2007) which is specifically what this paper will focus on.

Using the foundational Rosner 1971 study which looked at chunking and recall effects in

different school grades, the effects of chunking across age groups in children and youth will be

discussed in depth.

Recall and Chunking Across School Grades

In 1971 A researcher named Sue Rosner wanted to understand better the effect that

chunking while studying had on free recall, especially across age groups in children and youth.

To do so, participants were split by classroom grade, with the grades included being first, fifth,

and ninth. Three different instructional conditions were then administered to each group

concerning the group of words they were trying to remember. The first condition was an

administration of the list of words with only basic instructions and no other help, the second had

the participants overtly rehearse the items while looking at a picture presentation of each of item,

and the third condition was to “chunk” the items by establishing links between them. The links

that the participants created were individual to them and were not provided by the researchers.
 Across all grades, recall, organization, and subjective groupings increased with age. In

first grade the condition type that was administered had no effect on recall or on organization,

except for in the chunking condition. At the grade five level all performance measures were

facilitated by chunking and the participants showed the most improvement in recall through the

chunking condition. In grade nine the same results were obtained, except that it was also found

that under the rehearsal condition a small decline in recall was found, compared to the other two

conditions.

Conclusion

Overall, it seems clear that as a person ages and their brain matures and increases in its

capacity to retain information, recall is improved. It is also clear that no matter the age, chunking

does seem to have a positive relationship with recall. One particularly interesting thing to note is

that each participant was responsible for their own chunking methods, meaning that whatever

associations were made, likely had meaning to them. This is important as one could assume that

had the chunking associations been provided by the researchers, the results may have varied.

This could be a potential limitation and future direction of this study.

 References

Allen, P. A., & Coyne, A. C. (1989). Are there age differences in chunking? Journal of

Gerontology, 44(6), P181–P183.

https://doi-org.byu.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/geronj/44.6.P181

Huffman, C. J., Matthews, T. D., & Gagne, P. E. (2001). The role of part-set cuing in the recall

of chess positions: Influence of chunking in memory. North American Journal of

Psychology, 3(3), 535–542.

Isbilen, E. S., Frost, R. L. A., Monaghan, P., & Christiansen, M. H. (2022). Statistically based

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General, 151(11), 2623–2640. https://doi-org.byu.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/xge0001207

Jones, G., & Macken, B. (2018). Long-term associative learning predicts verbal short-term

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org.byu.idm.oclc.org/10.3758/s13421-017-0759-3

Lu, X., Dai, A., Guo, Y., Shen, M., & Gao, Z. (2022). Is the social chunking of agent actions in

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org.byu.idm.oclc.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105249

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 Appendix

A note from the author

Thank you so much for this cognition class, Maddy! At the beginning of the semester, I

was very nervous to take cognition because I would not consider myself to be a “science person”

but you made it so approachable and fun. I loved being in your class and seeing your passion for

cognition come to life every day. You are wonderful and I wish you the best of luck in

completing grad school and whatever career choices come after. Merry Christmas! 

- Hannah Weber