Developmental change in the nature of attention allocation in a dual task

The Relation Between Attention and Memory

The relation between attention and memory has long been deemed important for understanding cognition, and it was heavily researched even in the first experimental psychology laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt and his colleagues. Since then, the importance of the relation between attention and memory has been explored in myriad subdisciplines of psychology, and we incorporate a wide range of these diverse fields. Here, we examine some of the practical consequences of this relation and summarize work with various methodologies relating attention to memory in the fields of working memory, long-term memory, individual differences, life-span development, typical brain function, and neuropsychological conditions. We point out strengths and unanswered questions for our own embedded processes view of information processing, which is used to organize a large body of evidence. Last, we briefly consider the relation of the evidence to a range of other theoretical views before drawing conclusions about the state of the field.

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

Engaging cognitive control is essential to flexibly adapt to constantly changing environments. However, relatively little is known about how prior task experience impacts on the engagement of cognitive control in novel task environments. We aimed to clarify how individuals learn and transfer the engagement of cognitive control with a focus on the hierarchical and temporal aspects of task knowledge. Highlighting two distinct cognitive control processes, the engagement of cognitive control in advance (proactive control) and in response to conflicts (reactive control), we conducted six preregistered online experiments with both adults (Experiment 1, 3, and 5: N = 71, N = 108, and N = 70) and 9- to 10-year-olds (Experiment 2, 4, 6: N = 69, N = 108, and N = 70). Using two different experimental paradigms, we demonstrated that prior task experience of engaging reactive control makes adults and 9-to 10-year-olds respond in a reactive way in a subsequent similar-structured condition with different stimuli in which proactive control could have been engaged. This indicates that individuals do learn knowledge about the temporal structure of task goal activation and, on occasion, negatively transfer this knowledge. Furthermore, individuals exhibited these negative transfer effects in a similar-structured condition with different task goals and stimuli, indicating that they learn hierarchically-structured task knowledge. The collective findings suggest a new way of understanding how hierarchical and temporal task knowledge influences the engagement of cognitive control and highlight potential mechanisms underlying the near transfer effects observed in cognitive control training.

Disentangling Processing and Storage Accounts of Working Memory Development in Childhood

Researchers have been asking the question of what drives the development of working memory (WM) during childhood for decades. This question is particularly challenging because so many aspects of cognition develop with age that it is difficult to disentangle them and find out which factors are causal or fundamental. In this review, we first prepare to discuss this issue by inquiring whether increases in storage, processing, or both are the fundamental driving factor(s) of the age-related increase in WM capability in childhood. We contend that by experimentally manipulating either factor and observing changes in the other, it is possible to learn about causal roles in WM development. We discuss research on school-aged children that seems to suggest, by means of such an approach, that the growth of storage is causal for some phases or steps in WM tasks, but that the growth of processing is causal for other steps. In our theoretical proposal, storage capacity of the focus of attention determines earlier steps of information processing by constraining the selective encoding of information into WM, whereas processing dependent on the focus of attention determines later steps, like the detection of patterns that can simplify the effective memory load and adoption of a proactive stance of maintenance in dual-task settings. Future directions for research are discussed.

Working Memory Constrains Long-Term Memory in Children and Adults: Memory of Objects and Bindings

We explored how individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity affected subsequent long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Unlike past studies, we tested WM and LTM not only for items, but also for item-color bindings. Our sample included 82 elementary school children and 42 young adults. The participants performed a WM task with images of unique everyday items presented sequentially at varying set sizes in different colors. Later, we tested LTM for items and item-color bindings from the WM task. The WM load during encoding constrained LTM, and participants with a higher WM capacity retrieved more items in the LTM test. Even when accounting for young children's poor item memory by considering only the items that they did remember, they exhibited an exacerbated difficulty with remembering item-color bindings in WM. Their LTM binding performance, however, as a proportion of remembered objects, was comparable to that of older children and adults. The WM binding performance was better during sub-span encoding loads, but with no clear transfer of this benefit to LTM. Overall, LTM item memory performance was constrained by individual and age-related WM limitations, but with mixed consequences for binding. We discuss the theoretical, practical, and developmental implications of this WM-to-LTM bottleneck.

Working memory development: A 50-year assessment of research and underlying theories

The author has thought about working memory, not always by that name, since 1969 and has conducted research on its infant and child development since the same year that the seminal work of Baddeley and Hitch (1974) was published. The present article assesses how the field of working memory development has been influenced since those years by major theoretical perspectives: empiricism (along with behaviorism), nativism (along with modularity), cognitivism (along with constructivism), and dynamic systems theory. The field has not fully discussed the point that these theoretical perspectives have helped to shape different kinds of proposed working memory systems, which in turn have deeply influenced what is researched and how it is researched. Here I discuss that mapping of theoretical viewpoints onto assumptions about working memory and trace the influence of this mapping on the field of working memory development. I illustrate where these influences have led in my own developmental research program over the years.

Differentiation of Two Working Memory Tasks Normed on a Large U.S. Sample of Children 2-7 Years Old

The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, 4th ed. includes two measures of working memory normed on children 2;6-7;7. The present analyses of the typically developing children (N = 1,591, 812 female, 779 male, with an ethnic distribution approximating the United States) provide new, theoretically important information about these working memory tasks, Picture Memory and Zoo Locations. These new analyses establish developmental trends, individual-difference properties, and cognitive task properties. They show comparable developmental trends for the two tasks, but Picture Memory picks up more individual-difference variation and is more sensitive to knowledge. This analysis of normed tasks starting very young makes possible new methods for research on the early stages of childhood working memory development, about which little is currently known.