ABSTRACT
At the 1971 meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, John Flavell organized a now-celebrated symposium on children’s memory. The title of that symposium-“What is memory development the development of ?”—posed a question that has to a considerable extent defined the nature of research on children’s memory for more than three decades. Certainly, the answers to this question have changed dramatically over the years, as a function of changes in research paradigms, theoretical frameworks, and even the ages of the children being studied. Indeed, as theories and research paradigms have evolved, so too has knowledge of the surprising mnemonic competence of young children and of age-related differences in memory performance. Nonetheless, as we look at the field in historical perspective, we see a remarkable consistency in its focus on the characterization of something (e.g., strategies, underlying knowledge, basic capacity) that is thought to be changing with age. In contrast, there have been only a few investigations of changes over time in the memory skills of individual children, and thus, as a consequence, little attention has been paid to describing the ways in which early examples of that something (e.g., a naming strategy) give way to later and more sophisticated variations (e.g., a more complex rehearsal strategy). Moreover, still less attention has been devoted to the more difficult question of “What are the factors that operate to bring about developmental change?” As is apparent in the chapters of this excellent volume, the net result is that a great deal is now known about the contrasting memory skills of children of different ages. These advances notwithstanding, we suggest that what has not been explored very systematically is the process of development, and in this chapter we outline our vision for the type of research that is still needed.
