The Development of Children's Memory

In this introduction to The Development of Children's Memory: The Scientific Contributions of Peter A. Ornstein, we provide biographical information for Professor Ornstein and identify some contextual influences on his work. We then examine the four distinct but interrelated programs of research he conducted that form the structure for this volume. Next, we briefly describe the chapters that are included in the review of each research program and introduce the authors. Ornstein's scientific development over his 50 years in research is depicted as moving from the study of age-related changes in memory performance to an increasing emphasis on the developmental processes that result in skilled remembering in children. This transition both reflected and contributed to the emergence of a developmental science of memory. Over a century of memory research has swung between the two poles of the mechanistic model of Ebbinghaus and the adaptive, sociocultural, and organismic view of Bartlett, both of which were necessary but neither of which was essentially developmental. The Ornstein lab has, over the last half century, with experimental rigor, explored how growing children use memory adaptively in meaningful contexts. From the transitional era of verbal learning" in the 1950s to the cognitive revolution of the information-processing period in the 1980s, models of memory focused on the development of the deployment and control of strategic processes of remembering, models that, despite their modern sophistication, owe something to Ebbinghaus. But children grow up embedded in cultural structures of meanings ranging from the doctor's office to the courtroom, aided or hindered by the people in them, intent on helping growing children to use memory adaptively within those cultural narratives"--