ative film. After watching the film, children were shown groups of three, five, seven, or nine photographs and asked to reconstruct the scenes in the correct order. Only four of the 20 four-year-olds tested could correctly order the three photographs, and none were able to order the groups of seven or nine photographs. By contrast, most of the 10-year-old children were consistently able to reproduce even the nine-photo sequence into the correct narrative order. What are possible reasons for the younger children's rudimentary understanding of narrative information? First, evidence from several studies suggests the younger children may not be focusing their attention on the "essential" information. For instance, in the research by Collins, memory for nonessential information in the programs (such as character's hair color, dress, room furnishings) also tends to increase until junior high school and then decrease. Similar findings were obtained in studies of incidental learning in a variety of specific tasks (Hagen and Hale, 1973). In general, these studies suggest that as children grow older, their ability to know what is important in the plot and they acquire greater control in allocating their attention and focusing on what is important. This increased attention control has been found in other types of information-processing tasks. According to Comstock et al. (1978), child viewers have to "learn to learn" what is and what is not important information in a plotline. In addition to this "learning to learn" hypothesis, it is also likely that as children's general memory capacities increase with age, so too does their ability to remember parts of the program. Collins (1979), however, makes the argument that in addition to memory deficiency, other factors may account for the differences in the younger children's understanding of narrative plot. In a rather ingenious study Collins (1979) examined children's attempts to organize and integrate...
