The development of visual memory

In this chapter, we review and discuss the often paradoxical-seeming nature of children’s visual memory development. Typically, as adults, we tend to be skeptical of young children’s memory reports, and adults and older children generally outperform younger children in lab-based memory tasks. However, paradoxically, some studies suggest that infants can hold as many items in visual working memory as the average young adult, when tested using age-appropriate paradigms. To begin to resolve this paradox, we discuss some of the creative methods used to measure memory ability from infancy to adulthood, while attempting to prevent confounds associated with the concurrent development of other cognitive, social, and linguistic skills. Then, we discuss the potential reasons driving the observed improvements in visual memory ability across childhood, including increased representational richness (i.e., the ability to remember more precise, detailed representations) and development in the ability to actively maintain memoranda, including efficient attention allocation and active rehearsal of information. Finally, we examine how visual working memory capacity may improve partly because of increased long-term knowledge, and, conversely, how working memory capacity limitations may create a bottleneck for long-term memory accumulation.