Examined developmental change in the duration of memory for tone pitch in children and adults. In experiment 1, performance on a two-tone comparison task deteriorated across the intertone interval more quickly in younger than in older subjects. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the developmental difference in pitch memory persistence is unlikely to…

Tested the recognition memory of 4-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants using visual paired comparison tasks. Found that at even the youngest age that reaching was tested (6 months), infants showed evidence of recognition memory on the reaching task at delays at least as long as those at which they demonstrated recognition memory on the looking…

Explored whether developmental changes in the structure and coherence of preschoolers' personal narratives might provide some clues about childhood amnesia. Suggests that while children's narratives become more elaborate, more detailed, and more complex over the preschool years, children's recall of the same events over time is remarkably stable,…

Examined 3- to 13-year olds' memories for an experienced and a never-experienced medical procedure. Found that children 4 years or older at time of the procedure described it more accurately than did younger children. Longer delays between procedure and recall were related to providing fewer correct information units but not more inaccuracies.…

Two studies examined 6- and 9-year-old children's recall about events in which they had participated one to two years earlier. Found that amount of information reported in free recall decreased over the one- or two-year delays. For 6-year olds, there was a small decrease in accuracy of free recall. Reinstating specific cues maintained recall, but…

A study compared how well 31 children (ages 11-12) with mental retardation, 19 age-matched (CA) children, and 21 mental-age (MA) matched children were able to recall a staged event one day later. Children with mental retardation were more suggestible in response to closed misleading questions than were CA children. (Contains references.)…

The authors report 5 serial-recall experiments. In 4 of the 5 experiments, they show that irrelevant sound (IS) has a retroactive effect on material already in memory. In Experiment 1, IS presented during a filled retention interval had a reliable effect on list recall. Four further experiments, 3 of which used retroactive IS, showed that IS…

A visual short-term memory task was more strongly disrupted by visual than spatial interference, and a spatial memory task was simultaneously more strongly disrupted by spatial than visual interference. This double dissociation supports a fractionation of visuospatial short-term memory into separate visual and spatial components. In 6 experiments,…

In the single-store model of memory, the enhanced recall for the last items in a free-recall task (i.e., the recency effect) is understood to reflect a general property of memory rather than a separate short-term store. This interpretation is supported by the finding of a long-term recency effect under conditions that eliminate the contribution…

Targeted mutagenesis in mice has shown that genes from a wide variety of gene families are involved in memory formation. The efficient identification of genes involved in learning and memory could be achieved by random mutagenesis combined with high-throughput phenotyping. Here, we provide the first report of a mutagenesis screen that has…

Two groups of undergraduates received simulated amnesia instructions that either informed them how amnesics perform on memory tasks (informed; n = 11) or did not inform them about how amnesics perform on memory tasks (uninformed; n = 9). A third group received no such instructions (control; n = 9). Performance on a negative priming task revealed…

The contributions of working memory, inhibition, and fluid intelligence to performance on the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) and Tower of London (TOL) were examined in 85 undergraduate participants. All three factors accounted for significant variance on the TOH, but only fluid intelligence accounted for significant variance on the TOL. When the…

Mental time travel in human adults includes a sense of when past events occurred and future events are expected to occur. Studies with adults and children reveal that a number of distinct psychological processes contribute to a temporally differentiated sense of the past and future. Adults possess representations of multiple time patterns, and…