Children’s memory “in the wild”: examining the temporal organization of free recall from a week-long camp at a local zoo

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications

Table 1 Descriptive statistics and examples of excluded animal responses

Response type	4–5-year-olds		6–7-year-olds		8–10-year-olds		Example responses
Response type	M	SD	M	SD	M	SD	Example responses
Repeats or not informative	0.27	0.50	0.43	0.77	0.58	0.89	Repeat: “rhino, rhino” Not informative: “bunch of cute animals”
Intrusions and cannot verify animals	0.98	1.53	0.74	1.28	1.13	1.43	Intrusion: “black and white whale”; animal not found at the zoo Cannot verify: “chipmunks” which cannot be pinpointed to only one area at the zoo
Multiple locations animal (for which child’s response does not allow us to distinguish animals of the same type)	1.87	1.66	2.74	2.15	3.08	2.18	“Tigers”; Two types of tigers can be found in two different locations at the zoo^a

This table includes the means and standard deviations for the number of responses that were not included in the primary analysis. See Additional file 1: Result 2 for analysis with the “multiple locations animal” responses included
^aIn this example, the response “tiger” does not allow us to differentiate from the two different types of tigers at the zoo, and thus, this type of response was excluded from the primary analyses described in the main text (but see Additional file 1: Results 2). However, if a child’s response did allow us to differentiate animals of the same type, then responses were included in the primary analyses. So, if a child said, “Sumatran tiger, …, Amur tiger,” then both responses would be included in the primary analyses (each of the two tiger responses receives a free-recall point) since the child’s response allows us to distinguish tigers located in multiple locations at the Zoo. If a child said, “Sumatran tiger, …., tiger,” then, again, both tiger responses would be included in the primary analyses based on the rule described in the main text “Special Cases, Case Type 2”