ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY

The distinction between conscious and unconscious memory, which is cen tral to modem theories of cognition, has received only limited scrutin y in developmental research. One reason is a need for developmental me thodologies that allow age variability in conscious and unconscious me mory to be quantified. A simple paradigm (called conjoint recognition) and model are presented that quantify conscious and unconscious memor y for learned materials and for the types of unlearned materials that have been found to induce false memories in children. A validation stu dy showed that the model gave excellent accounts of the performance of 7- and 10-year-olds and that conscious and unconscious memory paramet ers reacted in appropriate ways to 3 manipulations (age, meaningfulnes s of distractors and targets, and priming).