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…

Fuzzy trace theory explains why children do not have to use rules of logic or premise information to infer transitive relationships. Instead, memory of the premises and performance on transitivity tasks is explained by a verbatim ability and a gist ability. Until recently, the processes involved in transitive reasoning and memory of the premises…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

When asked to recall their earliest personal memories, most children and adults have virtually no recollection of their infancy or early childhood. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as childhood amnesia. The fate of our earliest memories has puzzled psychologists for over 50 years, particularly in light of the importance of early experience…

Numerous brain areas work in concert to subserve memory, with distinct memory functions relying differentially on distinct brain areas. For example, semantic memory relies heavily on posterior cortical regions, episodic memory on hippocampal regions, and working memory on prefrontal cortical regions. This article reviews relevant findings from…