By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

Age-related change in processing speed has been linked directly to increases in reasoning as well as indirectly via increases in the capacity of working memory (WM). Most of the evidence linking change in speed to reasoning has come from cross-sectional research; in this article we present the findings from a 2½-year longitudinal study of 277 6-…

Recent research has shown that by 30 months of age, children can successfully update their representation of an absent object's location on the basis of new verbal information, whereas 23-month-olds often return to the object's prior location. The current results show that this updating failure persisted even when (a) toddlers received visual and…

An account of episodic memories is developed that focuses on the types of knowledge they represent, their properties, and the functions they might serve. It is proposed that episodic memories consist of "episodic elements," summary records of experience often in the form of visual images, associated to a "conceptual frame" that provides a…

Working memory (WM) processing in children has been studied with different approaches, focusing on either the organizational structure of WM processing during development (factor analytic) or the influence of different task conditions on WM processing (experimental). The current study combined both approaches, aiming to distinguish verbal and…

Dynamic relations during the preschool years across processes of control and understanding in the domains of emotion and cognition were examined. Participants were 263 children (42% non-White) and their mothers who were seen first when the children were 3 years old and again when they were 4. Results indicated dynamic dependence among the…

Distinctiveness effects in children's (5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds) false memory illusions were examined using visual materials. In Experiment 1, developmental trends (increasing false memories with age) were obtained using Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists presented as words and color photographs but not line drawings. In Experiment 2, when items were…

Items studied as pictures are better remembered than items studied as words even when test items are presented as words. The present study examined the development of this picture superiority effect in recognition memory. Four groups ranging in age from 7 to 20 years participated. They studied words and pictures, with test stimuli always presented…

Many models of learning rely on accessing internal knowledge states. Yet, although infants and young children are recognized to be proficient learners, the ability to act on metacognitive information is not thought to develop until early school years. In the experiments reported here, 3.5-year-olds demonstrated memory-monitoring skills by…

Verbal reminders play a pervasive role in memory retrieval by human adults. In fact, relatively nonspecific verbal information (e.g. "Remember the last time we ate at that restaurant?") will often cue vivid recollections of a past event even when presented outside the original encoding context. Although research has shown that memory retrieval by…

Visual recognition memory is a robust form of memory that is evident from early infancy, shows pronounced developmental change, and is influenced by many of the same factors that affect adult memory; it is surprisingly resistant to decay and interference. Infant visual recognition memory shows (a) modest reliability, (b) good discriminant…

In the present experiment, we used a deferred imitation paradigm to explore the effect of crawling on memory retrieval by 9-month-old human infants. Infants observed an experimenter demonstrate a single target action with a novel object and their ability to reproduce that action was assessed after a 24-hr delay. Some infants were tested with the…

The present study tests a model of category effects upon stimulus estimation in children. Prior work with adults suggests that people inductively generalize distributional information about a category of stimuli and use this information to adjust their estimates of individual stimuli in a way that maximizes average accuracy in estimation (see…

We used an optimized configuration of the delayed-response task to explore the ability of young infants to remember which of 2 locations was correct across 12 trials after a 1- to 2-sec delay. Performance improved with age, particularly after 5.5 months. These findings suggest an onset of appreciable working memory for many infants in the middle…

Studied whether patterns of developmental progression in reality monitoring were present in visual and auditory modalities and the role of cross-modal imagery in reality-monitoring tasks. Found scores revealed evidence of developmental progression in both auditory and visual source-monitoring tasks, but no effect of cross-modal imagery. (Author)