Misleading cues improve developmental assessment of working memory capacity: The color matching tasks

Constructivist developmental theory is needed in developmental neuroscience

“…8 These results would benefit from a developmental framework that explains the global and less differentiated performance in younger children in terms of processing limits in mental/executive attentional capacity in younger children. 2,[9][10][11][12][13][14] Overall, brain responses are affected by chronological age and performance scores, although the relation often is not semantically specified.…”

“…The only empirically clear way of appraising effective complexity of items or tasks is using the constructivist-developmental methods of Binet, Piaget and other constructivist researchers. 9,26 Ignoring this methodological prescription, as happens in Intelligence Quotient measures or in common measures of working memory, leads to errors in assessing effective complexity of tasks -which may be why good theory-guided quantitative measures of effective complexity are hard to find.…”

“…2,14,26 Thus, particularly in misleading situations, and depending on the desired topic of study, the age-range and age-group selections should be varied concurrently with the task's Md; and only if the difference Md minus Mc is kept constant across age-samples the performance (or practical) complexity of tasks will have been kept invariant across age groups. 9 In sum, choice of age groups in multiple-age experiments, and the expected performance complexity within or across age groups, should be guided by developmental theory.…”

“…And to ensure that the task is age appropriate, and verify that it elicits the theory-expected age-differential performance, tasks for children should be taskanalysed and validated behaviourally outside the scanner. 9,88 Age-variable performances call for parametric task designs. This need has been identified, 90 but it is rare to see parametric protocols in developmental neuroscience.…”

“…First, parametric studies using an interval-scale metric allow construction of difficulty levels that accommodate age-dependent differentiation of performance-thus quantifying developmentally cognitive stages. 2,9,13,14,26 It is important that difficulty levels be consistent and gradual; we are not thinking of tasks such as the usual n-back task where difficulty increases across three qualitative levels with irregular difficulty grading. Tasks with gradual increases of effective complexity have invariant executive requirements across suitably-graded levels (to separate tasks' executive demand from maturational attention demand); and so increments in cognitive load can be graded in mental-attention demand, varying with the number of items being processed.…”