Remembering frequency of OCCURRENCE: EFFECTS OF MATERIAL AND INTELLIGENCE

The aim of the present study was to test two of the criteria for automaticity of frequency of occurrence claimed by Hasher and Zacks: effortful encoding strategies and individual differences (as intelligence inariance). Three groups of subjects, 12 Mildly mentally retarded children, 12 Nonretarded children matched with Mentally Retarded on mean Mental Age, and 12 Nonretarded children matched with Mentally Retarded on mean Chronological age par - ticipated in the experiment. They were administered four kinds of 12 stimuli (pictures, non-sense pictures, words and odorants) in an incidental learning condition. For each list, four of the stimuli were shown once, four twice, with the last appearing three times. Subsequently, the participants were presented the items and they were required to judge the frequency of occurrence for each of them. Analysis indicated that Mentally retarded children scored lower than Nonretarded and that stimuli were better or worse remembered accord - ing to their characteristics (e.g., their imaginability). Results do not support some of the conditions claimed for automaticity in the recall of frequency of occurrence as assumed by Hasher and Zacks. Implications for educational psychology are outlined