Brainerd C J, Reyna V F, Howe M L, Kingma J
Division of Educational Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson 85721.
Monogr Soc Res Child Dev. 1990;55(3-4):1-93; discussion 94-109.
Many theoretical positions on memory development anticipate that forgetting rates should vary substantially with age. The nature of these age variations is also relevant to many applied questions about child development that have major social policy implications, such as the veracity of children's eyewitness testimony and the long-term effectiveness of classroom instruction. Surprisingly, developmental studies of long-term retention have repeatedly produced the puzzling finding that forgetting rates are age invariant. It now seems, however, that these null age trends may have been artifacts of variables such as measurement insensitivity, floor effects, and stages-of-learning confounds. Assuming, as some later studies suggest, that forgetting rates vary with age when these factors are controlled, there are three overriding questions that must be dealt with in the developmental analysis of forgetting: the relative importance of storage failure versus retrieval failure, the relative importance of true forgetting processes versus test-induced processes, and the relative importance of storage-based reminiscence versus retrieval-based reminiscence. We describe a framework (disintegration/redintegation theory) that provides a conceptual environment within which research on these questions can progress. This framework, which evolved from fuzzy-trace theory, reinterprets processes such as storage failure, retrieval failure, restorage, and retrieval relearning in terms of levels of featural integration in traces (i.e., the extent to which contextual information is integrated with core semantic gist to produce a coherent representation). The theory is implemented in a mathematical model (the trace-integrity model) whose parameters deliver measurements of relevant memory processes on a common ratio scale. In a series of experiments, the model was used to study the theory's predictions about the contributions of these memory processes to long-term retention in subjects between the ages of 7 and 70. All the experiments were standard long-term retention designs (an initial acquisition session, followed by a 1-2-week forgetting interval, followed by a series of retention tests).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
许多关于记忆发展的理论观点预计，遗忘率会随着年龄的增长而大幅变化。这些年龄差异的本质也与许多关于儿童发展的应用问题相关，这些问题具有重大的社会政策意义，比如儿童目击证人证词的准确性以及课堂教学的长期效果。令人惊讶的是，长期记忆保持的发展研究一再得出令人困惑的发现，即遗忘率与年龄无关。然而，现在看来，这些零年龄趋势可能是测量不敏感、下限效应和学习阶段混淆等变量造成的假象。假设正如一些后续研究表明的那样，当这些因素得到控制时遗忘率会随年龄变化，那么在遗忘的发展分析中必须处理三个首要问题：存储失败与提取失败的相对重要性、真正的遗忘过程与测试诱导过程的相对重要性，以及基于存储的回忆与基于提取的回忆的相对重要性。我们描述了一个框架（解体/重新整合理论），它为这些问题的研究提供了一个概念环境。这个框架源自模糊痕迹理论，根据痕迹中特征整合的水平（即情境信息与核心语义要点整合以产生连贯表征的程度）重新解释存储失败、提取失败、重新存储和提取再学习等过程。该理论在一个数学模型（痕迹完整性模型）中得以实现，其参数在一个通用的比例尺度上给出相关记忆过程的测量值。在一系列实验中，该模型被用于研究该理论对这些记忆过程对7岁至70岁受试者长期记忆保持的贡献的预测。所有实验均为标准的长期记忆保持设计（一个初始习得阶段，随后是1至2周的遗忘间隔，接着是一系列记忆保持测试）。
