take advertiser's motivations into account when assessing any particular advertisement's claims, although there is reason to argue, as Roberts does, that this does not occur until after children understand that advertisements try to sell products. Throughout the elementary school years children build on their understandings of television and advertising to acquire fuller grasps of these concepts. Memory in advertising information. In this section consideration will be given to research on age-related changes in children's memory for advertising information. Two sorts of measurement procedures have been used: first, measurement of cumulative knowledge about advertising outside of a television-viewing situation and, second, recognition or open-ended recall tests immediately after viewing television advertisements. Both sorts of measurement procedures have yielded essentially similar results: children's recognition and recall of the advertising messages increase as they grow older. Major increases in memory seem to occur between kindergarten and third grade. Ward (1972) and Ward et al. (1977) report studies of five- to 12- year-old children's recall of their "favorite" television commercial. Measures were taken in the course of an interview outside of a television-viewing situation. The children's responses were content analyzed for the number of commercial elements mentioned, the completeness of the storyline, and mention of brand name and other product features. The general finding from both studies is that children's recall for the commercials becomes more complete, coherent, and unified as they grow older. Whereas the youngest (kindergarten) children tended to recall a single element of the commercial (for example, a girl playing with a doll), the older children tended to recall more product and commercial plotline information, recognized that the information in a sequence was telling a story, and generally gave a more unified multidi...
