| Summary: | Thesis (M.Sc.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1989. Psychology Bibliography: leaves 71-76. Although there is a considerable amount of knowledge about how children acquire information, very little is known about how they retain information in memory. Both acquisition and retention are important in cognition and both must be understood to have a more complete picture of cognitive development. Some of the factors responsible for the absence of research in children's long-term retention, as well as the methodological and analytical refinements necessary for studying children's long-term retention, are discussed. A mathematical model of long-term retention, one that partitions forgetting and relearning into storage and retrieval components, is described and applied to an experiment in which grade 2 and 5 children's retention of 3-item clusters was examined. The clusters varied in semantic relatedness (related or unrelated) and in presentation modality (pictures or words) and retention was examined across 2 sessions over different retention intervals (at 2 and 16 days or 16 and 30 days after acquisition). Both forgetting and relearning were observed at retention with changes in performance being due to alterations in both the availability of information in storage and the retrievability of that information. The most prominent developmental difference was found in forgetting, not relearning, with younger children forgetting more than the older children. Interestingly, regardless of age, storage failure was greater than retrieval failure. The results of this study were interpreted in the context of the recently developed trace-integrity theory of long-term retention in which both the storage and retrieval aspects of forgetting and relearning are combined into a single unified framework.
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