An investigation of children’s working memory capacity for task rules

Abstract

Studies investigating the development of working memory typically measure children's ability to maintain declarative information (e.g., lists of words) for a short period of time. But working memory also relies on the maintenance of procedural information such as task rules to guide behavior. In comparison to children's working memory capacity for declarative information, little remains known about how children's ability to maintain and act on procedural information in working memory develops throughout childhood.For this reason, Experiments 1 and 2 investigated whether children's working memory capacity for task rules increased with age, using the increase in reaction time with the number of stimulus-response mappings as an index of working memory capacity. Children aged between 5 and 11 completed a stimulus identification task in which the number of stimulus-response rules was varied. Overall, set-size effects decreased with age, suggesting that younger children have a reduced working memory capacity for task rules. A proportional analysis of the reaction time data confirmed that age-related differences in overall reaction time cannot explain this finding. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that age differences in basic capacity, rather than strategic ability, are the cause of the observed difference in working memory capacity. Hence, these results show that developmental differences in working memory capacity affect not only a child's ability to recall information, but also their ability to act accordingly.

How does language support the acquisition of novel cognitive tasks? Investigating the role of task complexity and task instructions.

“…Such research may provide further insights into what happens when a task exceeds working memory capacity (would participants still be able to use language to maintain a subset of the S-R rules?). A fine-grained analysis of set-size would also be of interest from a developmental perspective, as it could investigate whether older children's improved ability to maintain and execute sets of S-R rules (e.g., van 't Wout & Jarrold, 2019) is driven by age-related improvements in the use of verbal strategies (e.g., Tam, Jarrold, Sabatos-DeVito, & Baddeley, 2010). Most importantly, this study has shown that it is essential that theories of cognitive skill acquisition and instruction following consider not only the crucial role of language, but also the factors that modulate the contribution of language to learning novel tasks.…”

Evidence for positive and negative transfer of abstract task knowledge in adults and school-aged children

“…Alongside this first aim, we explored potential developmental differences in the learning of task knowledge of the temporal structure of the activation of task goals. Previous studies have demonstrated developmental improvements in learning knowledge of task representations (i.e., hierarchical complexity) from childhood to adolescence (e.g., Amso et al, 2014;van 't Wout et al, 2019;Verbruggen et al, 2018). We also expected potential developmental improvements in the degree of learning of the temporal aspects of task knowledge between school-aged children and adults (e.g., more pronounced transfer effects of task knowledge in adults) However, given that no previous 1 Unger et al (2016) reported that the working memory task used by Bhandari and Badre (2018) was relatively challenging for 7-to 11-year-olds.…”