Howe’s book presents a good overview of much of the latest research on early memory. A great many APA books suffer from the fate of edited volumes: a multitude of independently authored chapters, redundantly introducing the same sound-bite reductions of knowledge. Howe’s work follows an older and arguably better tradition, that of the scholarly monograph. Howe is author, not editor, and each chapter carefully presents a different aspect of the memory literature, achieving both breadth and depth.

As the title suggests, Howe focuses on empirical research into memory in early childhood. This literature has been influenced both by the general interests of developmental psychology and by an interest and need to investigate childhood trauma, and Howe includes a balance of studies that pertain to traumatic events as well as non-traumatic memory.

The book’s strengths include its comprehensiveness in terms of the literature pertaining to early childhood memory, and the cautious way in which the weaknesses of studies are highlighted, particularly limitations in generalizability due to methodological issues. Although a fair measure of description is provided for significant studies in the field, this description is limited to explaining the design and conclusions of studies, and noting their limitations. One weakness is that detailed quantitative data is usually lacking: Howe’s book could have served as a meta-analytic single-point of reference, but it doesn’t. It is too bad that he did not present more actual data from the many studies he cites, for example, in tabular form.

Howe’s premise is that there are unitary trace structures and not multiple traces in memory. At the end of the book, Howe elaborates on this model. However, he assumes a familiarity with this model and it would have been stronger for him to present the model in greater detail at the beginning of the book, rather than to introduce elements of it and the empirical support for it throughout the book. Another shortcoming is that Howe presents this model as the most robust, arguing that a unitary memory trace is modified as future experiences occur (or in the very young child, as the sense of self develops). Not all leading memory researchers would agree that there is only a single trace involved in memory and subsequent experiences. Furthermore, there is substantial research with brain-injured adults showing quite discrete processes, at least in terms of retrieval disruption, for episodic memory (of events), semantic memory (of learning), and procedural memory (of non-verbal material like motor skills). Howe does not address how his theory can be reconciled with this data. Other researchers argue that new experiences (such as misinformation) lay down new memory traces, and that multiple traces compete. Howe dismisses this as unparsimonious, although it is not apparent to this reviewer that a theory that proposes modification of a single memory trace rather than addition of new traces can be supported on parsimony alone. Indeed, very recent research suggesting the growth of new neurons in primate brains, related to the time-coding of memories in primates, might suggest that new memories are laid down onto old ones.

Although these theoretical issues are important, they will probably be addressed by neurophysiologists in the coming years. In the meantime, there is a solid body empirical findings from non-biological psychologists about the functioning of memory, and Howe covers well the portion of this research that focuses on memory in early childhood.

Marcus Tye Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Psychology at Dowling College, Long Island, NY

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