Developmental Psychology: Children and Memory

There is strong evidence to suggest that children's memory improves with age, preschool children can only hold a few bits of information in their short term memories at a time, as they get older this improves with age, as does their ability to hold more complex and abstract bits of information. It is thought this happens because of maturation of the brain and experiences children gain with age. Experience is a certain cause of this development, one study found that Mayan children in Mexico lagged behind their peers in standard memory tests of pictures and nouns but improved significantly when asked to recall more familiar objects such as recalling small objects in a model of a Mayan village (Rogoff and Waddell, 1982).