ABSTRACT

Over the last 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in research on children’s memory (Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998). A substantial corpus of work now documents the surprising mnemonic competence of infants (e.g., Bauer, 1995; Diamond, 1995; Meltzoff, 1988a; Rovee-Collier, 1995) and preschoolers (e.g., Baker-Ward, Gordon, Ornstein, Larus, & Clubb, 1993; Baker-Ward, Ornstein, & Holden, 1984; Fivush & Hudson, 1990; Goodman, Rudy, Bottoms, & Aman, 1990; Perris, Myers, & Clifton, 1990), at least under some conditions. The literature also indicates the presence of substantial age differences in many aspects of memory performance. For example, developmental changes are routinely observed in the degree of detail reflected in children’s reports (e.g., Fivush & Hamond, 1990), the amount of forgetting observed (Brainerd, Kingma, & Howe, 1985; Brainerd, Reyna, Howe, & Kingma, 1990), and the deployment and effectiveness of deliberate strategies for remembering (Bjorklund, 1990; Ornstein, Baker-Ward, & Naus, 1988). The surprising sophistication of young children’s memory, on the one hand, and clear age-related differences in performance, on the other, represent two themes that characterize our current understanding of the development of memory.