ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the findings from developmental studies of normal forgetting from long-term memory. It outlines the theoretical developments that may allow us to gather both forgetting and suggestibility under one explanatory umbrella. The ramifications for childhood memory suggestibility seem to be straightforward. Age differences in forgetting should set the stage for age differences in memory suggestibility. The issue of what sorts of factors inoculate memories against forgetting has, of course, figured prominently adult retention experiments. A well-known outcome of such experiments is that mere memory testing is a surprisingly effective inoculator. On the one hand, it appears that the foregoing analysis can be productive in helping us achieve some preliminary theoretical understanding of the data of childhood suggestibility experiments. The counterargument that this finding is a by-product of correlated developmental differences in learning rate or learning opportunities or both has not received support in follow-up studies.
