piece of information, moreover, is a crucial part of the evaluation of its availability and usefulness (Wimmer, et al., 1988). Because memory consists in both the knowledge of a fact and the knowledge of its part in prior experience (James, 1892), efforts to identify the source of knowledge imply memory performance.
The more externally supplied mediators the subject requires, the less cognitively mature and complex the subject. To a greater or lesser extent, increases in cognitive complexity depend on increasingly conscious use of mediating strategies (Flavell, 1977). The employment of explicit retrieval strategies, for example, accounts for differences in performance between younger and older school age children on a wide range of memory tasks. Mothers implicitly act on knowledge of mediation when they modulate the complexity of their utterances bases on a child's language development (Gelman & Shatz, 1977). Likewise, young children's initially poor performance on a problem is only a partial reflection of their competence; it is also necess
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