Children's working-memory processes: A response-timing analysis.

Abstract

Recall response durations were used to clarify processing in working-memory tasks. Experiment 1 examined children's performance in reading span, a task in which sentences were processed and the final word of each sentence was retained for subsequent recall. Experiment 2 examined the development of listening-, counting-, and digit-span task performance. Responses were much longer in the reading-and listening-span tasks than in the other span tasks, suggesting that participants in sentence-based span tasks take time to retrieve the semantic or linguistic structure as cues to recall of the sentence-final words. Response durations in working-memory tasks helped to predict academic skill and achievement, largely separate from the contributions of the memory spans themselves. Response durations thus are important in the interpretation of span task performance.

On the capacity of attention: Its estimation and its role in working memory and cognitive aptitudes

“…There is now a considerable variety of studies in which relationships between different types of WM procedures and intellectual aptitudes, and their development, have been assessed (e.g., Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001;Booth, MacWhinney, & Harasaki, 2000;Caplan & Waters, 1999;Conway et al, 2002;Cowan et al, 2003;Daneman & Hannon, 2001;Daneman & Merikle, 1996;Engle et al, 1999;Fry & Hale, 1996;Gathercole & Pickering, 2000;Haarman, Davelaar, & Usher, 2003;Hedden & Park, 2003;Hitch et al, 2001;Hutton & Towse, 2001;Kyllonen & Christal, 1990;Lustig et al, 2001;Miyake, Friedman, Rettinger, Shah, & Hegarty, 2001;Oberauer et al, 2002;Salthouse, 1996;Swanson, 1996). Yet, there is not much agreement in the field as to the definition of WM, the best measures to examine it, or why these measures work (e.g., see the differences of opinion within the chapters of Miyake & Shah, 1999).…”

“…There is some evidence that participants do not always engage in attention-sharing between processing and memory maintenance, as one might assume; in some tasks, they appear to switch attention between storage and processing, provided that the processing task included rich semantic cues for retrieval of the memoranda (Copeland & Radvansky, 2001;Cowan et al, 2003;Hitch et al, 2001). There has been some concern that the feature of the processing task that impairs memory performance is the imposition of a time delay during which rehearsal is impossible (Towse, Hitch, & Hutton, 1998) or the imposition of high-frequency retrievals or processing during which rehearsal is impossible or storage is somehow interfered with (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004;Saito & Miyake, 2004).…”

“…For digit span, this may occur because of a reliance on phonological memory, which is instrumental in vocabulary acquisition (Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998). For listening span, it may occur not only for the same reason but also because of a more general linguistic influence; the sentences may be used as cues to recall of the sentence-final words (Cowan, Towse et al, 2003).…”

“…Some of the data from the conventional WM measures (counting-, listening-, and digit-span tasks) and the scholastic tests in Experiment 1 were reported by Cowan et al (2003), which focused on response timing. These measures are included here in order to examine their relation to less conventional tasks in the same study that have not been reported previously: the running-span, ignored-speech, and visual-array tasks that we used to assess the capacity of the focus of attention.…”

Impulsivity, working memory, and impaired control over alcohol: A latent variable analysis.

“…Working memory span tends to be positively associated with total response time for the longest list recalled (Cowan, 1992;Tehan & Lalor, 2000), and it has been argued that response time represents an informative index of working memory task performance (Cowan et al, 2003). Thus we used each participant's median response time across the digit span trials as an additional indicator of the latent working memory factor.…”