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The authors test the memory recall of 9-month infants to specific events following a 30 day period. Topics include long-term memory, infant psychology, and impact of a second exposure to events.

This article reviews the physiological constructs of memory development as they relate to a child's ability to recall accurately detailed accounts of sexual abuse. Counselors are provided with practical suggestions for increasing the reliability of child witnesses., For several decades, Piaget's (1954) theory of cognitive development has dominated the literature on children's thinking. His astute observations provided insight for a generation of educators and developmental experts into [...]

The authors examine the results of using misinformation to attempt to influence or change the recollection in children and adults. Topics include eyewitness testimony, effect of misinformation, and memory recall comparison by age.

Children aged 4, 8 and 13 were tested to see if they could remember which interactive events they participated in were real and which were imaginary. Research shows that 4 year olds were less able to distinguish between reality and imagination and reality monitoring decreased for all children after one week.

Children's memories about a task varied as to whether the end result was visible to them or whether the end result caused a transformation or disappearance. Children remembered their activities much more clearly when the end result was stable and remained visible.

Research on memory in children indicates that the origination of the lexicality effect occurs just before recall in the item information redintegration, a process mostly bypassed in serial recognition. While the lexicality effect was produced by an increase of nonword phoneme identity errors, phonological similarity effect arose due to phoneme order errors.

The present study examined the effects of type of change in a picture (addition or deletion), and the effects of presentation time on children's recognition of animate objects (butterflies and cats). Five- or 6-yr.-old children viewed original pictures in a learning phase for 6 or 10 sec., and then they viewed in a test phase originals and altered pictures in which features were added to or deleted from original pictures. They were required to answer whether test stimuli had been seen before. Analysis showed that, although children discovered added features more frequently than deleted features in pictures of butterflies, they discovered deleted features more frequently than added features in pictures of cats (asymmetric recognition). Asymmetric recognition was not influenced by stimulus presentation time. Although asymmetric recognition was observed in children and adults for pictures of butterflies and cats, the feature for which alterations affected recognition was different. These results indicated that children process information about animate objects differently from that about inanimate objects and specifically by kind (domain-specific). The features to which children pay attention may change with development (age).

It is assumed that personal episodes from any age less than about four years can rarely be recalled (infantile amnesia) because episodic memory is not well developed until this age. To investigate this, experiments were conducted with 30 4- and 30 5-yr.-olds. Experiments first examined whether the children could report parent-child games in a sports festival two days after the festival. The results indicated that 4-yr.-olds could not report the episodic contents of the games properly even though they reported the results of the ball matches as well as the 5-yr.-olds. Seven days after that report, the subject was told twice by the experimenter about realistic or unrealistic events as if these were their own experiences. The subject was again required to report the events seven days after receiving information. The results showed that 4-yr.-olds tended to mistake the information provided by the experimenter for their own real experiences. These results indicate that there may be a critical difference of episodic memory between 4- and 5-yr.-olds. Episodic memory was not well developed yet in 4-yr.-olds.

Recent research has shown that children remember more from television news than from print news, a finding that has been explained by the extra mnemonic support offered by redundant television pictures (the dual-coding hypothesis). The present study was designed to examine three alternative explanations, which attribute children's superior recall of television news to (a) underutilization of the print medium, (b) a recall advantage of listening compared with reading, and (c) imperfect reading ability. A sample of 192 fourth and sixth graders was presented with children's news stories, either in (a) their original television form, (b) a bare print version, (c) a print version supplemented with photo material, or in (d) an audio version. Results indicated that the television presentation was remembered better than any of the other three versions. The results of the study were consistent with the dual-coding hypothesis, whereas no support was found for the alternative explanations tested in the study.

Infants' preferential looking at novel objects and adults' preference for the familiar indicate that preference may be influenced by whether the objects have been experienced previously. Infants and adults may have opposite preferential tendencies; however, infants' preference for a familiar object which they have experienced orally casts doubt on this as a developmental process. To examine both the influences of experienced modalities and age on the relationship between preference and memory, tactile-visual preference and memory tests were employed in 4- and 5yr.-olds. The results indicated the dissociation of preference by recognition only in 4yr.-olds: those who recognized the objects preferred the familiar and the 4-yr.-olds who could not recognize them preferred the novel. The 5-yr.-olds tended to prefer the familiar objects regardless of recognition. The results may suggest an age effect on the relationship between preference and recognition.

This study sought to examine further the effect of facial transformation on accuracy of recognition by a sample of young children. Specifically, groups of 6- and 8-yr.-old children were familiarized with 10 target stimuli and were then given a recognition test in which the targets were randomly mixed with 20 distractor stimuli. During the test, half of the target stimuli were transformed (addition of a mustache) and half of the target stimuli remained unchanged (clean-shaven). Subjects indicated which stimuli were previously viewed target faces, regardless of whether a mustache had been added. Analysis indicated no differences between the two groups for the unchanged faces; however, the addition of facial hair increased false alarms and lowered hits and d' values for the younger group only. These results suggest that the groups performed equally well on recognition test for unchanged stimuli, but accuracy of recognition of transformed stimuli was differentially affected for younger subjects. This study raises further questions for assessing the accuracy of facial memory by children, especially when faces to be identified have been altered in physical appearance.

The author of this study investigated several questions regarding the relationships between a history of child abuse, recovered abuse memories, childhood memory in general, repression, and dissociation. Of the total sample (N = 560 undergraduate students), one quarter reported a history of child abuse, and 18% of these reported that they had a period when they lacked memories of their abuse. These participants endorsed a variety of descriptions of their recovered memories, many of which do not suggest a lack of conscious access to the memories. General quality of childhood memory was found to be unrelated to a history of abuse, and most participants, regardless of their abuse history, reported recovering memories from their childhood in general. Repressive personality traits were found to be unrelated to recovering abuse memories, but dissociative traits were found to be weakly associated with recovering abuse memories.

Objective: This study examined a significant issue for chronic sexual abuse investigations: Children's eyewitness testimony about repeated events. The few previous studies focused on preschoolers and none used the present methodology of presenting repeated events differing slightly in their details, as would happen in chronic abuse. Method: One group of 6- to 7-year-olds played individually with an experimenter on one occasion; the other group experienced three such events, with some details remaining the same and others changing. In a phased interview, children were questioned about the initial event. Results: For details which stayed the same, the children who experienced three events had more accurate memories. They had poorer memories than the single-event group for details which were changed in the later events; however, this was due to interference errors, with errors of omission and commission being lower than in the single-event group. Children conveyed clearly that inappropriate touching did not occur. Conclusions: Children who experienced repeated events have increased recall for repeated details but confuse the timing of details which change across events. The findings support previous suggestions that 9a) it is unrealistic to expect children to be able to report repeated events without some confusion about timing of details and (b) children are resistant to misleading questions about abuse. Key Words: Child abuse, Children's eyewitness testimony, Incidental memory, Repeated events.

Two groups of children and a control group of adults completed a visual memory task previously shown to produce representational momentum in adults. In the task, a computer-animated target was shown moving either horizontally or vertically, and the target vanished without warning. After the target vanished, observers indicated the location at which it had vanished. Both children and adults exhibited representational momentum, i.e., indicated locations slightly beyond where the target actually disappeared, and the magnitude of representational momentum was larger for younger children than adults. Implications of the results for issues of sensitivity to dynamics and for reliance on analogue representation are discussed.

In Study 1, children were reinterviewed about an event they had taken part in 2 years earlier when they were 6 years old (M.-E. Pipe & J. C. Wilson, 1994). In Study 2, children were reinterviewed about an event in which they had participated 1 year earlier when they were 6 or 9 years of age (S. Gee & M.-E. Pipe, 1995). Interviews were conducted with or without cue items and distractors, as in the original studies. The amount of information reported in free recall decreased over the 1- or 2-year delays, and for 6-year-olds, there was also a small decrease in accuracy of free recall. Reinstating specific cue items in Study 2 maintained recall when attention was drawn to them, but prompting children led to a decrease in accuracy. Whereas information repeated across interviews was highly accurate, information reported for the first time at the long delays was not.

Objective: The study compared children's reports of two medical events, to assess the effects of the type of event on children's recall. Additionally, the study examined the effect of props on children's event reports. Method: Twenty children between the ages of 37 and 67 months were interviewed following either a voiding cystourethrogram (VCUG) or a pediatric assessment (PA) at a hospital. Interviews were conducted between 6 and 8 days after the event and included a doll and prop items. Results: Ratings of stress were significantly higher for children who underwent the VCUG than those who underwent the PA. Children who experienced the VCUG procedure reported more correct information than the children who experienced the PA. Age was correlated with the total amount of correct information reported. Stress levels were correlated with both errors and accuracy of information. Conclusions: Children who experienced a stressful medical procedure remembered more than children who experienced a neutral medical event, although this increase in amount recalled was at the expense of accuracy. These findings suggest that stress impacts negatively on recall; however, the unique and structured nature of the VCUG procedure compared to the PA, and the familiarity of the PA prop items to the children who experienced the VCUG procedure, may also have contributed to differences in recall of the two events. Key Words - Child witness, Testimony, Stress.

In behavioral studies, children's memory for tonal frequency has been found to persist for less time than adults' (T. A. Keller & N. Cowan, 1994). The present study was done to evaluate the argument that this effect is due to changes in auditory sensory memory and not to attentional mechanisms. This question was investigated using mismatch negativity (MMN), an auditory event-related potential considered to be insensitive to attention. Participants were 6-7-, 8-10-, and 11-12-year-old children and adults. They were presented with trains of stimuli, beginning with either a standard (1000 Hz) or a deviant (1200 Hz) tone with trains separated by either 1 s or 8 s. All 4 groups exhibited MMNs after delays of 1 s, but only the adults and oldest children exhibited MMNs after 8 s, indicating that there are maturational changes in the duration of auditory sensory memory.

The study examined the serial memory ability of a group of preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) who were compared to age and language control groups. The children were asked to recognize serial patterns under short and long presentation durations. The subjects were presented with images of common objects (that appeared to be easily recoded into a phonological form) and iconic images of scribble drawings and unfamiliar faces (that did not appear to invite recoding). Under long presentation conditions, the performance of children with SLI resembled that of their age-matched peers on all 3 types of tasks. However, under short presentation conditions, children with SLI performed worse than their age-matched peers on all 3 tasks (and similarly to their language-matched peers). The performance of the children with SLI declined dramatically in all conditions when the items were presented for a brief period. If the serial memory deficits of young children with SLI were specific to phonological processing, their performance on recognizing the pattern of common objects should have been impaired, but not their performance with other visual tasks that are less likely to be recoded. Instead, serial memory in children with SLI was affected by presentation duration across tasks. The findings suggest that recognizing serial patterns is dependent, in part, on the speed of processing serial information. The findings are discussed in relation to models of limited capacity processing. KEY WORDS: specific language impairment, working memory, serial memory, preschool children, short-term memory

These experiments are the first to investigate children's encoding and use of information about a memory cue in Bjork's (1972) intentional forgetting task. In Experiment 1, children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 and college students were given cues to either remember or forget after the presentation of each picture. Recall and recognition tests of pictures and cues followed. The procedure in Experiment 2 was identical to that in Experiment 1 except that the list of presentation pictures was altered for some children (Grades 3 and 4) and adolescents (Grades 8 and 9) so that remember and forget cues were associated with particular taxonomic categories. In Experiment 3, the testing component was modified so that children (Grades 2, 3, and 4) and college students were asked to recall only the cue associated with each picture. The results indicated that (1) children as young as second graders encode the cue associated with each picture, although to a lesser extent than do college students, (2) much improvement in intentional forgetting is still occurring during adolescence, (3) only adults adequately cluster their recall by cue, (4) associating remember and forget cues with items from different categories does not increase the differentiation between cues, and (5) eliminating picture recall and recognition has minimal effects on the magnitude of cue judgments. These results suggest that children's difficulties on intentional forgetting tasks stem, at least in part, from their poorer encoding of information about whether an item should be remembered or forgotten.

Developmental differences in conceptual and explicit memory tasks were explored using perceptual and conceptual implicit and explicit memory tasks as well as perceptual and conceptual study processing. Results reveal a developmental difference in conceptual memory tasks although particular memory performance forms exhibited independence from age. Further, mental processes involved in memory tasks are developed at an early age.

Card sorting, category naming and item-by-item rehearsal are used by children in an organized and coherent temporal patterns to assist them in word recall. A series of five study/recall trials reveal that sorting is synchronized at the start of the trial while rehearsal occurs at a later period in the trial. This suggests that children learn the category of each item before learning them individually.

Childhood anxiety is related to memory. Research compared 160 sixth- through eighth-grade children with varying levels of anxiety. Results also highlight the complexity and multidimensionality of the relationship between childhood anxiety, memory systems, the emotional valence of stimuli, and cognitive processing types.

The distinction between conscious and unconscious memory, which is central to modern theories of cognition, has received only limited scrutiny in developmental research. One reason is a need for developmental methodologies that allow age variability in conscious and unconscious memory to be quantified. A simple paradigm (called conjoint recognition) and model are presented that quantify conscious and unconscious memory for learned materials and for the types of unlearned materials that have been found to induce false memories in children. A validation study showed that the model gave excellent accounts of the performance of 7- and 10-year-olds and that conscious and unconscious memory parameters reacted in appropriate ways to 3 manipulations (age, meaningfulness of distractors and targets, and priming).

The automatization of language skills plays a critical role in the relationship between language proficiency and the use of spontaneous rehearsal strategies by children who are deaf. This was gleaned from an analysis of the role of language proficiency and automatization of language skills in rehearsal use. Both language proficiency and automatization of language skills were found to be significant predictors of rehearsal use, with automatized language further found to be a partial mediator of the language proficiency and rehearsal use relation.

Studies of children's memory function and of new theories of memory are imperative to increased understanding of memory development. Research on children's short-term memory, phonological memory, visuospatial memory, episodic and metamemory reveals that such aspects demonstrate considerable change from infancy through the preschool period and on to early school years. Another interesting finding was that children over seven years of age have memory functions that are almost adult-like in organization and strategies.

Research shows that four-year-old children need greater situational support than six-year-old children prior to demonstrating cognitive competencies. Five situations were used to analyse the external representation strategy use of young children, with the usage shown to increase when the children were given physical or verbal prompts or were trained. A range of strategies was used by the young children to perform object placement tasks in experiments. The use of external representation strategies did not rise with verbal instructions that were less explicit.

Judith A. Bowey's finding that there is no specific link between vocabulary acquisition and phonological memory in five-year-old children is inconsistent with the findings of other research. Bowey's nonword repetition methodology is inadequate in comparison with other research techniques, with Bowey's results not equivalent to expected data. Bowey's method incorporates nonstandard features which may have made the measure unreliable. Bowey's finding that long-term phonological learning is not mediated by phonological short-term memory is undermined by the theoretical evaluation and empirical evidence.

Research finds no support for claims by Alan D. Baddeley and Susan E. Gathercole that there is a direct link between receptive vocabulary and phonological memory in five-year-old children. The results of experiments by J.A. Bowey that suggest their theory is inconclusive should be interpreted conservatively, however. Baddeley and Gathercole claim Bowey's findings are undermined because a nonstandard nonword repetition procedure was used in the research, but the procedure was only slightly altered to make it more appealing to young children.

Research shows that memory accuracy in preschoolers can be aided through the use of temporal modifiers and conversational processes, with stability promoted by explicit questioning. Children who had been read a short story were substantially more accurate after being exposed to consistent information 1 week later under nonexplicit questioning than those exposed to misleading information. The difference was not great under explicit questioning at 1 week, but after 7 weeks explicit questioning produced much more accurate responses than nonexplicit questioning.

Researchers investigated whether children between the ages of four and six experience a developmental shift which allows them to base their memory judgements on episodic or contextual retrieval rather than trace-strength. Researchers showed children different pictures on two successive days and asked them to remember if they had seen the pictures today or yesterday. The older children in the group showed an improved ability to make recency judgements, but the results did not support the hypothesis that the differences were due to a developmental shift towards reliance on episodic recall.

Forty 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds discussed 3 past events with their mothers and completed a set of theory of mind tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and their understanding of knowledge. Semipartial correlations and analyses of covariance showed that children's theory of mind scores were related to their participation in memory conversations, independent of age and linguistic skill. The frequency with which mothers provided new information was related to children's theory of mind scores, although mothers' direct replies to children were generally unrelated to children's understanding of mind. This research takes an important step toward examining the relevance of theory of mind skills to real-world, social interaction. The results have implications for explaining the emergence of autobiographical memory.

The positive effects of the use of strategic behaviors on children's recollection of events is examined. Children's metamemory about the relationship between strategy use and recollection is also described. Results of the experiment show that children who use strategic behaviors significantly improve their recollection of events. The results also show that metamemorial development contributes to the effective use of strategies.

A delay of one year between the time of actual interview and the occurrence of an event affects younger children differently from older ones. Older children can recall events more accurately than younger ones even after a year has lapsed. Younger children tend to be less accurate in their accounts of events after a year has passed. Thus, the recollection of both groups are influenced by their ages, the length of delay between the event and the interview, the nature of prop items and the mode of recall.

A study is conducted to examine the cognitive deficits that may account for the arithmetical difficulties of children. Theories regarding information processing speed and information retrieval from long-term memory are considered and found to offer a highly logical explanation for children's poor mathematical performance. Findings suggest that children with arithmetic difficulties are particularly deficient in processing basic arithmetic information, which may be caused by a general deficit in processing speed.

A study was conducted to investigate preschoolers' beliefs about the relations between effort, interest and recall, and to determine the realism of these beliefs. It was found that the research participants believed that other children their age would try harder to remember if they were highly interested in the task and that these extra efforts would improve recall. The results indicate that the first belief held true for boys but not for girls. No evidence was found to support the second belief. These findings suggest the children's beliefs about effort-interest-recall relations are generally naive.