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For some time now, questions have been asked about the impact of television and video materials on the cognitive and social development of preschoolers and older children. More recently, these same questions have been asked in relation to the extensive exposure to these media that infants and toddlers are currently experiencing. To answer these questions, we review current research that explicitly targets these concerns and provide new insights into the role these media play in early development.

We outline the nature of dynamic systems, both linear and nonlinear, and we review dynamic systems principles that apply well to various aspects of human development, including the emergence of new forms, phases of stability and instability, continuous and discontinuous change, and differentiation among individual trajectories. We then document the growth and popularity of dynamic systems approaches for understanding a diverse array of developmental domains. Finally, we acknowledge the contribution and impact Esther Thelen has made in this area of developmental science, and dedicate this special issue to her memory.

Over the past three decades impressive progress has been made in documenting the development of encoding, storage, and retrieval processes in preverbal infants and children. This literature includes an extensive and diverse database as well as theoretical conjecture about the underlying processes that drive early memory development. A selective review of some of this literature is provided to illustrate the extent and scope of this research, what is currently known about how memory develops over time, and some of the questions that remain to be answered. Importantly, research on early memory development has provided insights into a number of longstanding issues that have been prominent in the memory literature more generally (e.g., the memory systems question, infantile amnesia). It has also yielded practical information relevant to memory functioning in real world settings (e.g., for forensic and clinical psychology). We conclude that the basic processes needed to encode, store, and retrieve information are present very early in life and that although significant developmental advances take place across early childhood, many of the processes that govern memory in preverbal children are common with those of verbal children and adults. These issues are discussed and future directions for research are suggested.

A longstanding issue in psychology has been, When does human memory begin? More particularly, when do we begin to remember personal experiences in a way that makes them accessible to recollection later in life? Current popular and scientific thinking would have us believe that memories are possible not only at the time of our birth, but also in utero. Indeed, some writers in the popular press (as well as some recent television programs) suggest that we can remember past lives and that such memories are affecting our current behaviors. The purpose of this special issue is to examine, in a scientific context, what the most recent empirical data have to say about the nature of early memory and its development. In this article, we provide the background to the questions that prompted this special issue and suggest that memory for personal events, although it may start quite early in life, does so much later than claimed in popular writings about early memory.

The authors review competing theories concerning the emergence and early development of autobiographical memory. It is argued that the differences between these accounts, although important, may be more apparent than real. The crux of these disagreements lies not in what processes are important, but rather, the role these different processes play in the emergence of autobiographical memory and the temporal primacy of these controlling variables. These differences are explored theoretically and then extant as well as new data are brought to bear on these issues. What emerges is a new, more inclusive, multifactorial framework that integrates the controlling variables from diverse perspectives providing a more complete account of the beginnings of autobiographical memory.

The trace integrity framework, including the associated mathematical model, is used to summarize a corpus of data on the development of children's and adults' long-term retention. The purpose of this review is to get some leverage on what role storage and retrieval processes play in the forgetting and subsequent recovery of memory traces. What this review shows is that (1) forgetting is dominated by storage, not retrieval, failures; (2) trace recovery is dominated by retrieval, not storage, operations; and (3) storage failure rates decline with age in childhood, whereas only modest developments occur in retrieval recovery operations. These findings are then applied to current issues concerning adult recall of childhood memories.

In this article, we call for a formal approach to modeling the development of reasoning. We discuss the need to operationalize the nature of encoding and processing. These problems are reviewed in the context of fuzzy-trace theory with particular emphasis on class-inclusion reasoning experiments. We argue that salience manipulations (perceptual or linguistic) give the illusion of inclusion by promoting subclass-subclass comparisons. We present an alternate, mathematical model of class-inclusion reasoning in which memory and reasoning parameters are estimated and integrated in a skills analysis of performance. We conclude that without similar formal modeling efforts, the nature of children's reasoning will remain elusive.

A variety of resource and nonresource constructs relevant to cognitive development are described. An introduction to, and evaluation of, four resource-based neo-Piagetian models follows. Alternative models are then described. We conclude that the literature is rich in data and constructs, but that the link between them is frustratingly vague. Formal modeling, either computer- or mathematically based, seems to be the only way to establish this link.

It is well known that much of everyday cognition relies on both the ability to acquire information and the ability to retain it over extended time intervals. Theories of memory development must, therefore, include assumptions about the processes that govern long-term retention of information as well as processes that regulate its acquisition. Unfortunately, while much is known about the development of acquisition processes, considerably less is known about the ontogeny of long-term retention. In this article, we discuss reasons for this discrepancy, and we review extant research on children's amnesia and hypermnesia. As the review unfolds, a number of methodological and measurement problems are examined, and a new theoretical framework is presented that is implemented in a mathematical model. We show how application of this framework eliminates the indicated problems.

Although Age × Treatment interactions have been widely viewed as key results in theories of memory development, most examples of such results (e.g., Age × Treatment interactions in the effects of item concreteness, item elaboration, and organizational context) have been identified in list-learning experiments where children of different ages receive a small, fixed number of study-test cycles on the target list. A stages-of-learning analysis reveals that such designs confound a treatment's potential interactions with age and its potential interactions with stage of learning. The analysis also reveals specific situations in which such designs will produce converging, diverging, and crossover Age × Treatment interactions even though the treatment does not interact with age in any way. A series of experiments is reported in which a mathematical model that incorporates stages-of-learning distinctions is applied to the well-known interaction between age and item concreteness (pictures versus words) in cued recall. Although a diverging Age × Treatment interaction has been observed in previous research, it was found that there are at least four different interactions between the picture-word manipulation and age; (a) a diverging interaction at storage that operates throughout elementary school; (b) a diverging interaction localized within retrieval learning and operating during the first half of the elementary school; (c) a converging interaction localized within retrieval learning and operating during the second half of elementary school; and (d) a diverging interaction localized within retrieval performance and operating throughout elementary school.

Although it is generally acknowledged that decrements in long-term memory play an important role in the decline of everyday cognitive functioning in adulthood, problems have arisen in localizing the source of these memory deficits. In this article we address three of the methodological and measurement issues that have led to difficulties in interpreting research on adulthood developmental differences in acquisition and long-term retention. Specifically, these issues are stages-of-learning confounds, failures to separate storage and retrieval processes, and failures to separate forgetting from other factors that influence long-term retention tests. A general framework is presented in which each of these problems is dealt with. This model is subsequently applied to an experiment that examined the acquisition and long-term retention of pictures and words in associative memory in both young and old adults. The major findings were that (a) the picture-word manipulation had asymmetrical effects on acquisition and retention, (b) these asymmetries were different for the young and old adults, and (c) the locus (storage/retrieval) of age differences was different at acquisition than at retention. These results strongly suggest that the rules governing acquisition and forgetting are different, not only within age groups, but also across developmental levels in adulthood. More importantly, because the locus of developmental differences was different for acquisition and forgetting, it may be that different mechanisms underly the processing deficits experienced by the elderly when acquiring information than when trying to retain that information over extended periods of time.