LEARNING RATE, LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF FORGETTING

Reported developmental declines in forgetting rates may be artifacts of correlated individual differences in learning rates or in the number of learning opportunities that children receive. This possibility was investigated in 2 experiments by using causal models that implemented possible relationships among age, forgetting rates, learning rates, and learning opportunities. The artifact hypothesis was disconfirmed. Forgetting rates declined markedly between early and late childhood when individual differences in learning rates and learning opportunities were factored out. The results were interpreted in terms of fuzzy-trace theory's proposals about the development of verbatim and gist memory systems.