This is a review of two bodies of research conducted by myself and my colleagues that is relevant to child witness issues, namely childhood amnesia and children's eyewitness memory for stressful events. Although considerable research over the years has investigated the phenomenon of childhood amnesia in adults, only recently has it begun to be…

Research on factors that can affect the accuracy of children's autobiographical remembering has important implications for understanding the abilities of young witnesses to provide legal testimony. In this article, we review our own recent research on one factor that has much potential to induce errors in children's event recall, namely natural…

A hoary assumption of the law is that children are more prone to false-memory reports than adults, and hence, their testimony is less reliable than adults'. Since the 1980s, that assumption has been buttressed by numerous studies that detected declines in false memory between early childhood and young adulthood under controlled conditions.…

Overgeneral memory (OGM) is a phenomenon that refers to difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories. The tendency to be overgeneral in autobiographical memory recall has been commonly observed among individuals with emotional disorders compared to those without emotional disorders. Despite significant advances in identifying…

Episodic memories contain various forms of contextual detail (e.g., perceptual, emotional, cognitive details) that need to become integrated. Each of these contextual features can be used to attribute a memory episode to its source, or origin of information. Memory for source information is one critical component in the formation of episodic…

Historically, infants and very young children were thought incapable of explicit memory. As a result of changes in theoretical perspective and methodological developments, this assumption was challenged in the latter part of the 20th century. Substantial progress was made in describing age-related changes in explicit memory in the first two years…

These papers provide a useful progress report on how the mature and successful field of memory development is transcending traditional boundaries of populations, content, context, and design. Examining children's memory for distant as well as recent occurrences, for social interactions as well as individual experiences, for meaningful as well as…

We review recent applications of fuzzy-trace theory to memory development, organizing the presentation around two themes: the theory's explanatory principles and experimental findings about memory development that follow as predictions from those principles. The featured explanatory principles are: parallel storage of verbatim and gist traces,…

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…

Traces the origins of children's autobiographical memories, discussing research on infantile amnesia and young children's memory skills. Focuses on studies of children's long-term memory for autobiographical events that investigate delays of 1-2 years and delays of 4 years or more. Reports that a few studies have documented remarkably robust…

For more than three decades, the question ''What is memory development the development of?'' has guided research on children's memory. As theories and methodologies have evolved, so too has our knowledge of the mnemonic competencies of young children, and of age-related differences in memory performance. Unfortunately, however, current…

Research on memory development has increasingly moved out of the laboratory and into the real world. Whereas early researchers asked whether confusion and susceptibility to suggestion made children unreliable witnesses, furthermore, contemporary researchers are addressing a much broader range of questions about children's memory, focusing not only…

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…

The medial temporal lobe memory system matures relatively early and supports rudimentary declarative memory in young infants. There is considerable development, however, in the memory processes that underlie declarative memory performance during infancy. Here we consider age-related changes in encoding, retention, and retrieval in the context of…

Reviews empirical findings that misinformation effects in children are the product of automatic or unconscious and intentional or conscious processes. Outlines findings that show developmental change in cognitive processes underlying acceptance of misinformation in the absence of overall changes with age in the probability of reporting a…