It is necessary to maintain healthy and productive responses to the stresses and declines associated with aging. A key factor is the choice of attitude. It is critical to see opportunities for growth in aging – they are there to be had. Aging is accompanied by declines in the speed of learning, working memory, and memory capacity. These declines are not caused by disease and are nearly universal. Devoting memory resources to what is important, and ignoring things that are not important is an excellent strategy. The best way to avoid negative emotions caused by events and experiences in the past is to be actively involved in the present moment and planning for the future. Meditation is a valuable method to practice letting go and enhancing your awareness of the opportunities that are available now. Aging also presents an opportunity to demonstrate self-compassion. Frequently, persons express compassion to others throughout their lives with loving devotion and selfless actions, without realizing that that are worthy of compassion themselves. Psychological reserve can be enhanced by attention to the development of self-compassion and appreciation of what give your life meaning.

In a 2001 paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ornstein and Haden asserted that despite considerable progress in understanding age-related differences in memory performance, research on children’s memory offered too few insights into the processes that drive the development of skilled remembering. Essentially, the argument was that the focus of research was more on memory development than the development of memory. This chapter offers an update as to whether and to what extent critical gaps identified by Ornstein and Haden (2001a) remain.

In this chapter, we review Ornstein’s contributions to the study of children’s memory strategy use to maintain information they are expected to remember, including barriers, supports, and application. We then discuss our own work on how children go beyond maintaining information to extending their knowledge base by going beyond what was explicitly provided and self-deriving new knowledge through integration of separate learning episodes. We examine the parallels in how knowledge is maintained and extended, including the role of prior knowledge. We conclude with three lessons learned from the work of Ornstein and colleagues that will enrich developmental science: move the research into ecologically relevant and even “high-stakes” contexts, conduct longitudinal work, and investigate the role of metacognition.

The ability to assess the intelligence of other species has been constrained because it is not always easy to communicate to other species what we require of them. Furthermore, we tend to define the tasks with procedures designed for us rather than for the species in question. The appropriate assessment of animal intelligence is important, however, because it has demonstrated that although the human capacity for intelligent behavior quantitatively surpasses that of other animals, qualitatively, it is not as different as we generally believe. Furthermore, the intelligent behavior of other species demonstrates that although language and culture contribute to human intelligence, they are clearly not necessary. Finally, although we attribute certain human behavior such as unskilled gambling and cognitive dissonance to our complex social environment, the fact that other species show very similar suboptimal behavior suggests that simpler underlying processes likely are responsible for those behaviors.