查看文章

Traditional accounts of memory development suggest that maturation of prefrontal cortex (PFC) enables efficient metamemory, which enhances memory. An alternative theory is described, in which changes in early memory and metamemory are mediated by representational changes, independent of PFC maturation. In a pilot study and Experiment 1, younger children failed to recognize previously presented pictures, yet the children could identify the context in which they occurred, suggesting these failures resulted from inefficient metamemory. Older children seldom exhibited such failure. Experiment 2 established that this was not due to retrieval-time recoding. Experiment 3 suggested that young children's representation of a picture's attributes explained their metamemory failure. Experiment 4 demonstrated that metamemory is age-invariant when representational quality is controlled: When stimuli were …