The early experiences of children have been of considerable interest in memory research, because it is assumed that those experiences lay the foundation for their later behavioral and cognitive development. Implicit in that assumption is a capacity for long-term memory in children. Earlier, memories from the first year of life had been characterized by some researchers as being short-lived, highly generalized and diffuse, and devoid of place information (Nadel and Zola-Morgan, 1984; Nelson, 1984; Olson and Strauss, 1984; Schacter and Moscovitch, 1984; Mandler, 1990). More recently, however, there have been reports of intact memory functions in infants and very young children, using tests such as novelty-preference procedures, conditioning paradigms, auditory localization, and deferred-imitation procedures (reviewed by Rovee-Collier and Gerhardstein, 1997). Moreover, recent research indicates that young children can accurately recall specific events after delays of weeks and even months. Such long-term recall of events by young children would seem to depend on the temporal relationships among the components of the event, the familiarity or repeated experiencing of the event (Mandler, 1986), and the availability of cues or remainders of the event (Bauer, 1997).

Several explanations have been proposed for developmental differences in memory performance. The most important are different stores of resources in short-term memory (Cowan, 1997), different uses of mnemonic strategies (Guttentag, 1997), and different conditions of metamemory (Joyner and Kurtz-Costes, 1997). Further, it has been argued that developmental differences in memory performance may be attributable to age-related changes in the knowledge base (Kail, 1990).