Developments in declarative memory - Decreasing susceptibility to storage failure over the second year of life

摘要

The second year of life is marked by changes in the robustness of recall memory. Both, retrieval and storage processes have been implicated as the major source of age-related improvements in recall. Children 13 to 20 months of age were matched for levels of learning of laborator events (thereby eliminating encoding as a source of developmental difference) and tested for recall after delays as long as 6 months. In Experiment 1, 16-month-olds evidence less loss of information and more relearning than 13-month-olds. In Experiment 2, 20-month-olds evidenced less loss of infomation and more relearning than 16-month-olds. Patterns of performance across test trials and in relearning implicate a decline in susceptibility to storage failure as the primary source of the observed developmental trend.