Quantifying attentional effects on the fidelity and biases of visual working memory in young children

Abstract

Attentional control enables us to direct our limited resources to accomplish goals. The ability to flexibly allocate resources helps to prioritize information and inhibit irrelevant/distracting information. We examined developmental changes in visual working memory (VWM) fidelity in 4- to 7-year-old children and the effects that a distracting non-target object can exert in biasing their memory representations. First, we showed that VWM fidelity improves from early childhood to adulthood. Second, we found evidence of working memory load on recall variability in children and adults. Next, using cues to manipulate attention, we found that older children are able to construct a more durable memory representation for an object presented following a non-target using a pre-cue (that biases encoding before presentation) compared with a retro-cue (that signals which item to recall after presentation). In addition, younger children had greater difficulties maintaining an item in memory when an intervening item was presented. Lastly, we found that memory representations are biased toward a non-target when it is presented following the target and away from a non-target when it precedes the target. These bias effects were more pronounced in children compared with adults. Together, these results demonstrate changes in attention over development that influence VWM memory fidelity.

The influence of attentional biases on multiple working memory precision parameters for children and adults

“…Recently, Guillory et al. (2018) tested 4–7‐year‐olds’ precision in reporting the orientation of target stimuli in WM when targets were followed or preceded by an orientation distractor and when their attention was cued in preparation for encoding or during maintenance. Overall precision of recall was poorer in children compared to adults.…”

Development of updating in working memory in 4–7-year-old children.

“…There is a growing body of research examining the development of the ability to store information about objects in working memory. This work has shown that the number of object representations that can be stored in working memory increases throughout infancy and childhood (Cowan et al, 2011; Káldy & Leslie, 2005; Kibbe, 2015; Kibbe & Leslie, 2011, 2013; Pailian et al, 2016; Ross-Sheehy et al, 2003; Simmering, 2012), as does the fidelity and precision of those stored representations (Applin & Kibbe, 2020; Burnett Heyes et al, 2012; Cheng et al, 2020; Guillory et al, 2018). The ability to maintain bindings between objects’ surface features (e.g., color, shape, texture) and their locations in space is extremely limited in early development, increasing from about one feature-location binding at 6 months (Káldy & Leslie, 2005; Kibbe & Leslie, 2011), to around two feature-location bindings in toddlerhood (Cheng et al, 2019a; Kibbe & Applin, 2022; Kibbe & Leslie, 2013), to around four feature-location bindings at 5–6 years of age (Applin & Kibbe, 2020).…”

Young children monitor the fidelity of visual working memory.

“…However, we did not have specific predictions about the impact of set size on children’s performance. Previous work found that the precision of visual working memory increases with development (Guillory, Gliga, & Kaldy, 2018; Sarigiannidis, Crickmore, & Astle, 2016), as does the ability to bind feature and location information in visual working memory (Kibbe & Leslie, 2013; Simmering & Wood, 2017). Children are estimated to be able to hold anywhere from two to four single-feature items or two multifeature items in visual working memory during a change-detection task by age 5–6 (Pailian et al, 2016; Riggs et al, 2006; Simmering, 2012; Simmering & Wood, 2017) and around three multifeature objects by age 7 (Burnett Heyes, Zokaei, van der Staaij, Bays, & Husain, 2012; Riggs et al, 2011).…”