Long-term memory for pictures related to seriation, horizontality, and verticality concepts

To evaluate Piaget and Inhelder's (1973) hypothesis that memories are related to operative levels, 82 kindergarten and 101 4th-grade children were shown pictures involving seriation, horizontality, and verticality and were asked to reproduce them 1 wk and 5 mo later. In addition, tasks to assess seriation, horizontality, and verticality concepts were given to half of the children in the fall and to all children in the spring. Although there were some significant correlations between memories and operative levels, the relations were quantitatively weak and were undermined by several serious disconfirmations. Furthermore, although long-term memory improvements did occur, these were not systematically linked to individuals' operative development, nor did they occur significantly more often than memory deteriorations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).