The Development of the Fluency Heuristic in Childhood: More Questions than Answers

Abstract

Imagine the challenges that a 3-year-old child’s memory faces compared to that of an adult: The world is less predictable and the vocabulary is less familiar. Typically developing 3-year-olds are just beginning to harness the vast power of human language, and 3-year-old’s memory skills are only beginning to develop into their adult forms. For instance, children’s working-memory capabilities have been demonstrated to increase as they mature (Siegel & Ryan, 1989). When compared with adult memory performance, young children demonstrate greater susceptibility to false memory formation in some circumstances (Ceci et al., 2007) and less susceptibility in others (Brainerd et al., 2008). Metacognitively, children are often less effective at generating and implementing helpful retrieval and encoding strategies than adults (Chi, 1978). In many ways, young children’s memories are quite different from adult memories.