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.…

Research and theorizing on executive function (EF) in childhood has been disproportionately focused on preschool age children. This review paper outlines the importance of examining EF throughout childhood, and even across the lifespan. First, examining EF in older children can address the question of whether EF is a unitary construct. The…

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…

Latent class analysis (LCA) has been successfully applied to tasks measuring higher cognitive functioning, suggesting the existence of distinct strategies used in such tasks. With LCA it became possible to classify post hoc. This important step forward in modeling and analyzing cognitive strategies is relevant to the overlapping waves model for…

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…

Reviews literature on development of children's and adults' long-term retention. Finds that forgetting is dominated by storage (not retrieval) failures; trace recovery is dominated by retrieval (not storage) operations; and storage failure rates decline with age in childhood, whereas only modest developments occur in retrieval recovery operations.…

Reviews and reinterprets current developmental directed-forgetting literature within an inhibition framework. Argues that item-by-item cued directed-forgetting tasks manipulate selective rehearsal to produce greater recall of to-be-remembered than to-be-forgotten items, producing directed-forgetting effects by second grade. Blocked and…

Extends the concepts of utilization deficiencies in a review of 30 years of memory-training research. Finds that over half of training conditions showed at least one type of utilization deficiency. Utilization deficiencies were more common for younger than for older children and were more likely when training involved multiple, rather than single,…

Suggests an account of transitivity and transitive inferential reasoning differing from classic Piagetian and current information processing accounts. Postulates a three-component psychological system, with components relying on perceptual, linguistic, and conceptual subprocesses and sensitivity to simple cues. Maintains that the framework is…

Recent research has documented the variety of memory strategies children have in their repertoires at different ages and with different degrees of task experience. Of growing importance is understanding the processes by which children choose among available approaches. Evidence suggests that sociocultural influences shape individual repertoires of…