This study investigated the effects of distractors on children's task-relevant (central) and task-irrelevant (incidental) recall on a short term visual memory task involving pictures of familiar animals and household articles. The effect of mode of distractor (auditory or visual) and the effect of developmental level were also studied. Subjects were 60 eight-year-old and 60 eleven-year-old male and female children. Recall of central information was expected to decline more for older than younger children in the distraction conditions. This result was confirmed. Interference in recall was expected to be greater with a same-mode distractor (visual) than with a cross-mode distractor (auditory). However, results indicated that incidental recall was greater with the same-mode distractor. Central recall interference varied with the age of the subject, serial position of the correct response, and block of trials studied. Performance on the incidental learning task was expected to be higher with distraction in general as compared to a control condition. This hypothesis was confirmed. Results were discussed in terms of the selective and effective use of encoding strategies and attention deployment in memory tasks. (BD)