ABSTRACT
Research shows that young children are capable of impressive feats of memory early in their lives, and yet show surprising failures later on. The same infants who seem remarkably clever and sophisticated on one task can fail miserably on a different task, even one that is seemingly simpler to perform. This can lead to confusion, especially when general claims about memory are made on the basis of specific tasks. For example, there is evidence that infants as young as 8 months can recall the locations of hidden objects, even those objects that they have only seen a single time (Ashmead & Perlmutter, 1980). Due to these and other findings, quite reasonable claims have been made about the existence of explicit, longterm, or declarative memory in children younger than 9 months (Rovee-Collier, 1997). While no one would claim that infant memory is identical to healthy, adult memory, the results of many studies imply that there is an explicit memory system in place, perhaps not overly sophisticated but certainly functional even in very young children.
