MEMORY DEVELOPMENT
Memory concepts
Contents: declarative (explicit), subject to
conscious recall; implicit (unavailable to conscious
recall); or nondeclarative (procedural)
Types: semantic memory (language terms);
episodic memory (for events or episodes)
 Recognition is the most basic form of retrievalmerely recognizing a stimulus as new or
familiar. Recall is more demanding, as you must
remember something without it being perceived.
 Cued recall means there is a context or cue to
the item needed. Cues elicit more information,
but they must be effective cues.
 Free recall means the cue is self-generated.
 Location memory is memory for spatial
locations of items and it develops early, so there
are few age differences.
 Context-independent learning refers to
learning rote facts in school education,
purportedly for later use or elaboration.
Memory development in infancy has been studied
with habituation modalities- it shows discrimination
as well as retrievable memory.
 Preference for novelty paradigms show that
babies recognize new stimuli and prefer novelty
over repeated stimuli. 5 – 6 mo. old babies show
visual memory that lasts as long as 2 weeks.
Sucking tests show that babies will suck harder
to hear familiar rhymes than novel ones- auditory
memory.
 Conditioning techniques- Rovee-Collier
showed in the crib-mobile tests that babies as
young as 3 mo. remember the kicking activity 8
days.
 Context in memory recall has been shown to
make a difference- in similar conditions babies
recall behaviors more accurately. They were
even able to recall a 3-part sequence of behaviors
over 24 hours. This is essential for learning
language.
 Deferred imitation tasks showed that 10 – 20
mo. old babies could see an act and recall it and
use it as long as 1 year later.
Implicit memory is memory for information without
being aware that one is remembering. This does not
show an age difference. An interesting experimental
technique used involved wiring up 10 yr.olds to
register changes in skin conductance. Then they were
shown pictures of 4 and 5 yr. olds, some of whom
were classmates several years before. Even though
they didn’t show very accurate explicit memories for
the childrens’ faces, they often registered internal
responses to the familiar children. This indicates that
implicit memory may be more related to infant
memory, automatic memory than later explicit
memory.
Remembering events is an explicit memory, as we
are aware we are remembering an event we witnessed
or learned. We may not have intended to learn
something, it just occurred involuntarily- naturalistic
learning.
 Development of event memory requires
attention, interpretation, and storage. There can
be a glitch in the process at any point. Children
often pay attention to very different things than
adults do, since they value and are attracted to
different things (Cliff in Annapolis).
 Script-based memory is memory for events
according to their sequences of actions
(schematic organization.) We develop scripts for
things we repeat, so we develop a prototype of
expectancy. The 2.5 yr. old telling about the
camping trip shows how children remember
orders of events, but not specifics of events.
Two-year-olds are trying to process much new
information and the way they do that is by
embedding it into a context/ script that is familiar
and repeatable to them. Memory is serving to
help children predict events. So repeated events
are more predictable than single events.
Recurrent events are more important to know
and understand and predict. Being able to
anticipate an event allows even a baby to
participate more fully in their lives. Specific cues
can elicit specific memories, but we don’t always
know what cue is effective. (Story about 2.5 yr.
old Kiesha recalling the bee sting accurately
when she sees an ice cube wrapped in a cloth.
Her account was more explicit than she could
have expressed when the sting happened 6 mo.
before.)
 Role of parents in teaching children to
remember- parents play an important role in
children’s early memory development, focusing
attention on certain things rather than others,
conceptualizing related items, describing
connections in items and finding different things
of interest in what is presented by an experience.
It teaches children to observe according to the
who, what, where, when, & how of their world.
How parents focus attention and describe things
teaches children how to focus and remember.
Parents offer cues to memory as they ask children
what they remember from an experience. Children
whose parents will reinforce an encounter by
questioning their memories actually keep more
accurate memories than children whose parents
don’t enhance their remembrances. As parents talk
about past experiences, they add to a child’s verbal
repertoire as well as autobiographical memory.
Parents also talk differently to boys and girls,
resulting in girls having a better memory for shared
events than boys. Girls are given more evaluative
feedback from parents, are encouraged to embellish
their stories more elaborately, and to focus more on
social interactions (boys are given more feedback
about learning). So we learn to talk about and
remember what is focused on for us by our parents.
Children as eyewitnesses (particularly critical for
the legal profession to assess)
 Age differences in accuracy – preschool
children do not remember much, but what they
do remember is accurate & important to the
event. They can be cued to remember things
inaccurately, though. False memories are fairly
resistant to forgetting, however.
 Longevity of memory (rate of decay) As
children age, their accuracy increases as well as
the time a memory lasts. Younger children are
more likely to change their recall under multiple
questioning. Even 2nd graders will stick with
their original recall much more than
kindergarteners. Accuracy of recall declines with
repeated questioning of younger children.
 Hypernesia is a phenomenon where amount
remembered increases when people attempt to
recall certain information repeatedly. Repetition
does seem to facilitate performance. So repeated
questioning can sometimes enhance recall, or
reduce recall, or not affect it. If the questioning
is not designed to corrupt memory, it can
enhance the memory with the right cues.
 Age differences in suggestibility- all people
report false information in response to
misleading questioning, but children seem to be
even more susceptible to manipulation,
particularly when accusations or suggestions are
strong and persistent. This may be due to young
children’s reliance on verbatim traces, rather
than fuzzy gists, which are less open to loss of
memory.
 Source monitoring refers to being aware of the
source of information we remember. We
remember something, but we can’t remember
how we know that thing (which is critical in
eyewitness testimony). Young children have a
harder time remembering how they know
something. This can also contribute to their
greater susceptibility to manipulation.
 False-memory creation isn’t that hard to do – it
only requires misleading questions. Loftus did
groundbreaking research on adults’ susceptibility
to forming false memories with the “lost in the
mall” study. College students could be induced
to write about the time they were lost in the mall
at age 5, as their family member had reported.
25% of college students wrote elaborate
descriptions of this event and it never happened.
Of the true events reported by family members,
these students recalled 68%. More than 50% of
preschoolers will “remember” an event that
never happened after being questioned about
them. They continue to remember the event even
after being debriefed and told the even never
happened. They have less memory for
implausible than plausible events, however. In
general, true memories are richer in detail and
clearer than false memories, which are more
generic in nature.
Infantile amnesia and autobiographical memorywe generally don’t remember much from before age
3-4 years- infantile amnesia. The earliest age of
meaningful recall is age 2 (hospitalization or birth of
sibling) and age 3 (a move or death of a family
member) We lack autobiographical memory for
much more than that at such an early age. While
memory for trauma can be repressed, that’s not
usually what is happening here. One theory is that
memory for events before 3 or 4 is encoded
differently: less verbal symbolism, more imagery. So
when we look back from our adult perspective/
schema, we can’t return to representations made in
such different forms. Even though this theory
accounts for infantile memory loss, it doesn’t cover 3
– 4 year olds, since they have verbal symbolism.
What isn’t intact yet, however, is a separate sense of
self. Sense of self develops over the preschool years,
and until it is, events are not coded in terms of self, or
meaning to self. Also, early memory formation is in
terms of verbatim precise memory traces which are
more susceptible to decay. It takes a child a few years
to learn to develop fuzzy trace gist memories. The
fuzzy traces are laid down more dependably as
children enter school, which is also when memory
becomes more retrievable. Their language skills are
also developing in complexity, so memories are more
specific and more easily represented. They learn how
to remember from parents as they narrate experiences
and focus on certain events/ qualities over others.
This guidance is necessary in learning to code events.
 Hypnotic age regression is suggested as a way
to determine if infantile memories are there and
unretrievable through language, or simply not
there any longer. When hypnotized and asked to
return to preschool years, then given a
conservation task, the adults acted like adults
pretending to be preschoolers, but not behaving
accurately. Other experiments found their actual
memories were not as accurate when hypnotized
as when remembering without hypnotism.
Piagetian research on reconstructive memory
emphasize that memory is constructive, not verbatim.
We remember gists, not specifics. We add to our
memories as we gain further knowledge about the
world. (Memory recall is more like writing a book
than reading one.) The longer gap there is between
experiencing an event and remembering it, the
greater chance of distortion of memory. We also
distort memories when we forget how we know
something or where we learned it- source
monitoring error. (The author’s story about
remembering his bout with the croup as a baby was
interesting- since when he told his mother she said he
was remembering what happened to his 6-mo.-old
brother when he was 4 years old.)
Development of memory strategies (mnemonics)deliberate plans used to enhance performance.
Children will use multiple strategies and change as
needed when solving problems.
 Rehearsal- a child repeats the information.
Greater time used rehearsing relates to greater
information storage and recall. Older children
use this technique more often and effectively.
o Passive rehearsal is used by younger
children, repeating only one word.
o Active/ cumulative rehearsal is used by
older children repeating the last word and a
group of as many associated words as
possible. Training can enhance this skill.
Organization- a child combines items into
categories or units.
o Clustering means remembering items from
the same category together. This enhances
recall, too, and it develops with age. Older
children group on the basis of meaning and
recall more efficiently. Younger children
can be trained to do this and improve recall.
Retrieval- the process of accessing information
from memory for conscious use. Younger
children need more cues from the original
environment for recall than older ones.
o Elaboration means associating two or more
items by creating a representation of them.
Finding some imagery that includes both
items in a meaningful way.
Gender differences in memory performance favor
girls, as they use organizational strategies more
effectively. Many studies find no differences at all.
Factors that influence children’s use of memory
strategies
o Encoding-means how the information is
represented. Younger children use fewer
semantic features than older children, so
there is less recall. Younger children show
greater loss as a result of delay in recall.
Preadolescent children do not encode
information in a way so as to best organize
it.
o Knowledge base for the information to be
remembered makes a difference. The greater
familiarity the child has with a domain, the
greater memory recall s/he shows.
o Metamemory refers to knowledge of one’s
own memory processing. We know what we
know, as well as what we could not know.
Remembering is a 3-part process: diagnosis
(deciding what needs to be done), treatment
(using the best strategies for recall), and
monitoring (checking how accurate one’s
memory is). Metamemory increases with
age.
o Motivation does impact memory
development. When children are offered
monetary rewards for memory, they do
modify strategy use and increase memory. It
also serves to keep children on task longer.
Children will also spend more time on a task
if they hold greater interest in it. There
seems to be deeper cognitive processing on
tasks a child holds greater interest in.
Interest breeds success in general.
o Culture and memory strategies- in
Western schooling, memory strategies are
taught and required to master the rote list
memory used in our schools. In other
cultures memory tasks may require
remembering instructions or places in the
environment. Overall there are few cultural
differences found in memory development.
Recall is related to the type of task used.
(List recall is better for American children
than Mayan. Location recall is better for
Mayan children.) Culture also relates to
what children think is essential for success.
If a culture says success is dependent on hard
work those children will use those strategies. If a
culture says that success is due to natural talent,
then the parents will try to enhance talent
through various practice.
Consistency and stability of memory
o Domain-general or domain-specific? There is
no unitary memory construct that generally
increases with age.
o How stable is memory performance over
time? Memory is stable for tasks that don’t
require strategies for recall. When strategies are
required, there are changes in use of strategies
over time and that affects memory performance.
Forgetting and reminiscence- Forgetting is the
failure of memory once something has been
learned. Reminiscence is recall later of something
not remembered initially (Elizabeth Smart’s sister’s
memory recall after 9 mo.) Since there are
developmental differences in initial learning, there
are also differences in forgetting. There are fewer
differences found in more realistic circumstances,
though, than in controlled studies. Younger
children encode in terms of verbatim memories
which are more apt to be forgotten, than the gist
memories that older children form.
MEMORY DEVELOPMENT
Memory concepts
 Recognition
 Cued recall
 Free recall
 Location memory
 Context-independent learning
Memory development in infancy
 Preference for novelty paradigms
 Conditioning techniques- Rovee-Collier
 Context in memory recall
 Deferred imitation tasks
Implicit memory
Remembering events
 Development of event memory
 Script-based memory
 Role of parents in teaching children to
remember
Children as eyewitnesses
 Age differences in accuracy
 Longevity of memory (rate of decay)
 Hypernesia
 Age differences in suggestibility
 False-memory creation
Infantile amnesia and autobiographical
memory
 Hypnotic age regression
Piagetian research on reconstructive memory
Development of memory strategies
(mnemonics)
 Rehearsal
o Passive rehearsal
o Active/ cumulative rehearsal
Organization
o Clustering
Retrieval
Elaboration
Gender differences in memory performance
Factors that influence children’s use of
memory strategies
o Encoding
o Knowledge base
o Metamemory
o Motivation
o Culture and memory strategies
Consistency and stability of memory
o Domain-general or domain-specific?
o How stable is memory performance over
time?
Forgetting and reminiscence