Abstract
Around the beginning of this century, a time that loosely marks the dawn of scientific inquiry into child development, the factors that controlled forgetting and reminiscence from infants’ and children’s long-term memory were a source of considerable debate (see discussions in Ballard, 1913; Freud, 1914/1938; Vertes, 1931/1932). Historically, speculation concerning the ontogenesis of long-term retention has ranged from hypotheses in which forgetting was said to increase with age (e.g., critical periods in early experience that were deemed essential to development and, hence, were believed to be preferentially preserved [Bowlby, 1960; Tinbergen, 1951]) to those in which forgetting was said to decrease with age (e.g., Ballard, 1913; Vertes, 1931/1932). A similar range of hypotheses has been entertained concerning the locus of forgetting, extending from pure retrieval positions in which, barring head trauma, information was thought to remain forever intact in storage, simply fluctuating in accessibility (e.g., Freud, 1914/1938; Hoffding, 1891) to positions in which changes occur in the information that was stored (e.g., Kohler, 1929, 1941; Wulf, 1922).
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Howe, M.L., O’Sullivan, J.T., Marche, T.A. (1992). Toward a Theory of the Development of Long-Term Retention. In: Howe, M.L., Brainerd, C.J., Reyna, V.F. (eds) Development of Long-Term Retention. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2868-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2868-4_8
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