Children's incidental recall of colour information

Few researchers have examined adults' and children's incidental recall of c olour information. This is an important topic of research because eyewitnes ses of an event are often asked to report details regarding colour, e.g, of clothing or of a vehicle. The authors examined how well 4-year-olds, 7-yea r-olds, 10-year-olds and adults recalled and recognized colour information in two experiments. Each participant played a game in which he or she saw d ifferently coloured objects. After a 30-minure delay participants were give n a surprise colour recall rest and a colour recognition test. predominantl y primary colours were used in Expt 1 and mainly secondary colours were use d in Expt 2. In both experiments the adults and children performed well abo ve chance in the recall and recognition tasks, and there were no age differ ences in performance, thus supporting the hypothesis that colour informatio n is encoded automatically in memory. This result has implications for the recall performance of eyewitnesses.