ABSTRACT
There was a time when the study of infant and young children's memory was the purview of a small group of us who were doing basic research on the mnemonic processes that were developing over the first few years of life. The mid to late 1970s were the heyday of such research in terms of the quantity of studies that were conducted and subsequently published. During those years, we learned so much about the development of strategies, knowledge, and insights that some of us deluded ourselves into believing that the memory development riddle had been solved. As one indication of this, the reader can examine any of the three main developmental journals during that period (Child Development, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and Developmental Psychology) to verify that the late 1970s was the apogee of memory development publications. If one searches titles of published abstracts for key words that have to do with memory development (e.g., rehearsal, organization, eidetic imagery, LTM, STM, decay, reminiscence, strategies, trace, semantic knowledge, capacity differences), it is clear that this type of research peaked around the late 1970s. If we compare the number of articles that were concerned with memory development during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the unmistakable trend is one of declining frequency of published memory development articles, starting in 1983, but probably reflecting a decline in the conduct of such studies that began around the late 1970s—since it usually takes several years between the initiation of a study and its fruition as a journal article (see Fig.7.1).
