THE POWER AND LIMITATIONS OF THE STRATEGY DEFICIENCY MODEL OF MEMORY DEVELOPMENT - COMMENTARY

The contributors share the perspective that deficiencies in the use of memory encoding strategies contribute significantly to recall variabi lity within and across ages. The contributors also raise problems, how ever, for a straightforward application of the strategy deficiency mod el of memory development to describing and explaining individual diffe rences in memory. I discuss the problems in terms of a set of assumpti ons that are implicit in the model. The assumptions concern the suffic iency of encoding strategies to affect recall, the nature of the defic iency shown by younger and non-so-good processors, the mechanisms of d evelopmental and individual change, and the general power of memory mo dels to explain performance variability in everyday tasks.