The Effect of Extraversion,Detail Importance and Interference on the Recall of Prose by Eleven‐year Old Children

This study considered the relationship between extraversion and the recall of details in prose passages under conditions of two levels of detail importance (main and elaboration), two types of passage (thematic and sequential) and two degrees of interference (absent and present). The subjects were 96 11‐year old children who were divided into introverts, ambiverts and extraverts on the basis of their score on the Junior Eysenck Personality Inventory. A different extraversion subgroup listened to a prose passage containing 40 details under each of the experimental conditions and one hour later was required to free recall the material. Overall recall performance was not significantly affected by extraversion, but there was a significant interaction (P < 0.05) between extraversion and detail type in their effect on recall. Generally the recall of elaborative detail decreased with increasing extraversion, while for the main detail recall remained fairly constant. No other significant interactions were found. A post hoc inspection of the recall of the details suggested that introverts performed best when the content described appearance, construction or position, ambiverts did well on quantity and numerical information, while extraverts favoured simile‐type details.