Working memory in children: A time-constrained functioning similar to adults

Portrat, Sophie; Camos, Valérie; Barrouillet, Pierre

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2008.05.005

Cited by 39 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…However, the child with the faster rate of forgetting would experience a greater loss of information during that time relative to the other child, and consequently, their working memory performance would be poorer. While previous researchers have made suggestions along these lines Cowan et al, 1997;Hitch et al, 2001;Oberauer & Kliegl, 2001;Portrat et al, 2009), this is the first study to show evidence consistent with such a claim.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 49%

How quickly they forget: The relationship between forgetting and working memory performance.

Bayliss¹,

Jarrold²

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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This study examined the contribution of individual differences in rate of forgetting to variation in working memory performance in children. 112 children (mean age 9 years 4 months) completed two tasks designed to measure forgetting, as well as measures of working memory, processing efficiency, and short-term storage ability.Individual differences in forgetting rate accounted for unique variance in working memory performance over and above variance explained by measures of processing efficiency and storage ability. In addition, the nature of the variation in forgetting was more consistent with a non-executive forgetting parameter than an executive ability associated with resistance to interference. These findings indicate that individual differences in the rate at which information is lost from memory is an important constraint on children's working memory performance which has implications for current models of working memory that do not incorporate such a factor.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 49%

How quickly they forget: The relationship between forgetting and working memory performance.

Bayliss¹,

Jarrold²

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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show abstract

“…In other words, the more the distracting task captures attention, the less the memory traces can be refreshed and hence the poorer the recall performances. Several experimental pieces of evidence have been collected in favor of this theoretical model of WM via behavioral studies in adults and children (e.g., Barrouillet et al, 2007;Barrouillet et al, 2011;Gaillard, Barrouillet, Jarrold, & Camos, 2011;Portrat, Camos, & Barrouillet, 2009;Vergauwe, Barrouillet & Camos, 2010).…”

Section: The Time Course Of Chunking In a Wm-cstmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting the experimental dialogue between working memory and chunking: Behavioral data and simulation

et al. 2015

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Working memory (WM) is a cognitive system allowing short-term maintenance and processing of information. Maintaining information in WM consists, classically, in rehearsing or refreshing it. Chunking could also be considered as a maintenance mechanism. However, in the literature, it is more often used to explain performance than explicitly investigated within WM paradigms. Hence, the aim of the present paper was (1) to strengthen the experimental dialogue between WM and chunking, by studying the effect of acronyms in a computer-paced complex span task paradigm and (2) to formalize explicitly this dialogue within a computational model. Young adults performed a WM complex span task in which they had to maintain series of 7 letters for further recall while performing a concurrent location judgment task. The series to be remembered were either random strings of letters or strings containing a 3-letter acronym that appeared in position 1, 3, or 5 in the series. Together, the data and simulations provide a better understanding of the maintenance mechanisms taking place in WM and its interplay with long-term memory. Indeed, the behavioral WM performance lends evidence to the functional characteristics of chunking that seems to be, especially in a WM complex span task, an attentional time-based mechanism that certainly enhances WM performance but also competes with other processes at hand in WM. Computational simulations support and delineate such a conception by showing that searching for a chunk in long-term memory involves attentionally demanding subprocesses that essentially take place during the encoding phases of the task.

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“…Where available, we used measured response times (T a ) as an estimate of the mean duration of attentional capture by an operation, following Barrouillet et al (2007) and Portrat, Camos, & Barrouillet, (2008). However, we do not use the mean duration as the duration of each individual processing step, because we want to simulate a distribution of durations of attentional capture, analogous to the distribution of durations of other processes (i.e., encoding, refreshing, recall) in TBRS*.…”

Section: Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our hypothetical experiment varies these three variables independently. One way to accomplish this in practice is to measure processing duration t a online through people's response times in each processing step and add a fixed interval of free time after each response, as done by Portrat, Camos, and Barrouillet (2008). Alternatively, mean processing duration t a for each condition can be measured offline, and the total time for each processing step is determined by adding the desired free time to that mean (Barrouillet, Gavens, Vergauwe, Gaillard, & Camos, 2009).…”

Section: Simulation Of Benchmark Findings With Complex Spanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling working memory: a computational implementation of the Time-Based Resource-Sharing theory

2010

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Working memory is a core concept in cognition, predicting about 50% of the variance in IQ and reasoning tasks. A popular test of working memory is the complex span task, in which encoding of memoranda alternates with processing of distractors. A recent model of complex span performance, the Time-Based-Resource-Sharing (TBRS) model of Barrouillet and colleagues, has seemingly accounted for several crucial findings, in particular the intricate trade-off between deterioration and restoration of memory in the complex span task. According to the TBRS, memory traces decay during processing of the distractors, and they are restored by attentional refreshing during brief pauses in between processing steps. However, to date, the theory has been formulated only at a verbal level, which renders it difficult to test and to be certain of its intuited predictions. We present a computational instantiation of the TBRS and show that it can handle most of the findings on which the verbal model was based. We also show that there are potential challenges to the model that await future resolution. This instantiated model, TBRS*, is the first comprehensive computational model of performance in the complex span paradigm. The Matlab model code is available as a supplementary material of this article.

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Working memory in children: A time-constrained functioning similar to adults

Cited by 39 publications

References 21 publications

How quickly they forget: The relationship between forgetting and working memory performance.

How quickly they forget: The relationship between forgetting and working memory performance.

Promoting the experimental dialogue between working memory and chunking: Behavioral data and simulation

Modeling working memory: a computational implementation of the Time-Based Resource-Sharing theory

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