Abstract
Thirty-seven 4–5 year-old predominantly white children from moderate SES households, identified as high and low gender schematic, completed a Release from Proactive Interference task (RPI) comprised of drawings of same-sex gender-typed toys and animals. The RPI task assesses spontaneous comprehension, encoding, and short-term recall of items from two categories of information. As predicted, high gender schematic children demonstrated significantly greater patterns of release from proactive interference than low schematic children. Specifically, high and low schematic children's patterns of recall following a shift from same-sex gender-typed toys to animals differed significantly, suggesting that gender roles are a more salient and influential information processing dimension to high than low gender schematic children. Results add to data validating the present measure of gender schematicity and its ability to differentiate individual differences in the salience of gender roles to young children. Results also corroborate and expand on theory and research describing the impact and consequences of individual differences in the salience of the gender role dimension on the information processing of high and low gender schematic children.
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Levy, G.D. High and low gender schematic children's release from proactive interference. Sex Roles 30, 93–108 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01420742
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01420742