Children at ages three, five, and seven provided reports of their physical examinations immediately following the checkup and after delay of either one, three, or six weeks, or only after three weeks. Retention of event was extensive and accurate and not significantly affected by the time delays. Recall of seven-year olds was greater than that of…

Building upon a previous study, examined 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old and adult witnesses' memories of an event experienced 2 years earlier. Found that children were less consistent than adults across sessions of yes-no questions, less accurate in responses to open-ended questions, and more likely to fabricate answers to a question about a man's…

Three experiments measured 2.5- and 3.5-year-olds' long-term retention of object-location pairings. The subjects were provided with reinforcing information three weeks after the initial exposure and tested four weeks after initial exposure. It was found that this reinstatement (1) improved children's long-term retention; (2) affected both…

Fifteen deaf and 11 hearing children (ages 8-10) witnessed slides depicting a wallet theft and were interviewed using a free recall approach followed by increasingly directive questions. Although accuracy of the two groups did not differ in free recall, deaf children provided less accurate responses to directive questions, whereas accuracy of the…

Discusses the findings of a study that involves the testing of the pharmaceutical Ampakines on laboratory rats. Rats administered Ampakines learn remarkably quickly to navigate new mazes. The question now is does the drug make the rats alert or memory enhanced. Implications for treatment in humans is discussed. (ZWH)

A case is made for the construction of nomothetic theories that can also explain individual differences. The discussion uses examples from the memory area and presents an approach to memory that explains individual findings and individual differences in the context of a single model. (SLD)

A theory of visual information acquisition and visual memory is described that conjoins two models that have been used to describe low-level perceptual and higher level cognitive processes. Six experiments with 21 adult observers generally support the theory, although some weakness is discussed. (SLD)

Responds to previous article by Fincham, Beach, Moore, and Diener (this issue) on child sexual abuse. Focuses on importance of recognizing that attempts to reduce probability of false claims of child abuse would result in increasing probability of missing true claims of child abuse. Offers hypothesis-testing framework as useful heuristic for…

This study of 20 3-month-old infants with Down's syndrome and 20 nondisabled infants found that both groups were successfully trained to produce movement in an overhead crib mobile by kicking, and displayed long-term retention a week later. Conditioning and retention-test performance of the two groups did not differ. (Author/JDD)

Describes research on memory in preschool children. Each child was studied for scene and list memory. Domain-specific and general knowledge were not found to be strongly related to memory performance. Object typicality did not have a strong effect on memory, but size did. (GH)

Lexical, syntactic, structural, and semantic analyses were performed on essays written by 100 younger and 100 older adults. Few lexical or syntactic differences appeared. Older adults were less able to use more complex structure and semantics. Educational level and working memory were probably responsible for the differences. (SK)

Children's ability to remember and report past mental states was examined. Four-year olds were able to report all past mental states. Three-year olds reported past pretenses, images, and perceptions well; desires and intentions with moderate difficulty; and beliefs with great difficulty. (BC)

Children with speech disorders had lower short-term memory capacity and smaller word length effect than control children. Children with speech disorders also had reduced speech-motor activity during rehearsal. Results suggest that speech rate may be a causal determinant of verbal short-term memory capacity. (BC)

The addition of idiosyncratic features to individual members of an artificially constructed category enhanced specific item memory among 13 month olds, but not among 10 month olds. Discussion of findings focuses on their theoretical implications and the nature of the age difference. (RH)

Examines memory for visual narratives as a function of cinematic structure. Identifies two important principles (establishing shots and directional continuity) for restructuring real-world activities into coherent filmed sequences. (SR)