This volume is the first to describe how well we maintain the complex knowledge we acquire over several years and retain during the entire life-span. It will be of interest to researchers in human memory, developmental psychologists, gerontologists in academic and applied settings, and educators.

Describing how well we maintain the knowledge we acquire throughout life, this book describes the evolution of methods suitable for investigating our memory of complex knowledge acquired over several years and retained during the entire lifespan.

"This excellent book sets out the studies of real-world knowledge that Harry Bahrick and his collaborators have carried out over the past 35 years. The work is virtually unique in combining naturalistic observation with rigorous experimental methods, and the result is a fascinating collection of findings and ideas on how we learn, remember, and misremember information that we once knew well. It is essential reading for all students of learning and memory." -Fergus I.M. Craik, Ph.D., Rotman Research Institute, Toronto "Harry Bahrick has played a unique and important role in the study of forgetting. For over 40 years he has systematically explored the long term retention of knowledge from a wide range of domains ?over the life span. His work is practically important because such retention is of central importance to the whole purpose of education, and of great theoretical significance because it tests the generality of the much more constrained methods that necessarily dominate research in this area. In bringing together this important body of work, I confidently predict that this will become a classic of the memory literature." - Alan Baddeley, Ph.D., The University of York, UK