Forsberg, A. orcid.org/0000-0002-6635-6160, Adams, E.J. and Cowan, N. (2022) Why does visual working memory ability improve with age : more objects, more feature detail, or both? A registered report. Developmental Science, 26 (2). e13283. ISSN 1363-755X
Abstract
We investigated how visual working memory (WM) develops with age across the early elementary school period (6–7 years), early adolescence (11–13 years), and early adulthood (18–25 years). The work focuses on changes in two parameters: the number of objects retained at least in part, and the amount of feature-detail remembered for such objects. Some evidence suggests that, while infants can remember up to three objects, much like adults, young children only remember around two objects. This curious, nonmonotonic trajectory might be explained by differences in the level of feature-detail required for successful performance in infant versus child/adult memory paradigms. Here, we examined if changes in one of two parameters (the number of objects, and the amount of detail retained for each object) or both of them together can explain the development of visual WM ability as children grow older. To test it, we varied the amount of feature-detail participants need to retain. In the baseline condition, participants saw an array of objects and simply were to indicate whether an object was present in a probed location or not. This phase begun with a titration procedure to adjust each individual's array size to yield about 80% correct. In other conditions, we tested memory of not only location but also additional features of the objects (color, and sometimes also orientation). Our results suggest that capacity growth across ages is expressed by both improved location-memory (whether there was an object in a location) and feature completeness of object representations.
Metadata
Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. Developmental Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | cognitive development; feature memory; object memory; working memory |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 14 Jun 2022 09:09 |
Last Modified: | 24 Feb 2023 10:58 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13283 |
Related URLs: |