Adaptation of the Missing Scan Task to a touchscreen format for assessing working memory capacity in children

Abstract

Assessing children's working memory capacity (WMC) can be challenging for a variety of reasons, including the rapid increase in WMC across early childhood. Here, we developed and piloted an adapted WMC task, which involved minimal equipment, could be performed rapidly, and did not rely on verbal production ability (to facilitate the use of the task with younger children). In our adaptation, we portrayed the events of the object-based Missing Scan Task (creatures hiding in and emerging from a house) in a touchscreen format. In the full experiment, 67 participants aged 23 to 90 months achieved the longest set size (LSS) scores that were distributed across the full range of possible scores. A comparison of these scores with those obtained using object-based formats indicated general agreement between the versions of the task. Scores were found to increase with child age. We propose this (freely available) touchscreen adaptation as a suitable WMC task for use with children aged 2 to 7 years.

Preschool Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of associative anaphora

“…This was based on the general consensus in prior research that younger children have more limited working memory capacity than older children and adults (Alloway et al, 2004; Gathercole et al, 2004; Lehmann et al, 2014; Marcovitch et al, 2010; Roman et al, 2014; Simmering, 2012). Future research is required to directly test the connection between children’s comprehension of associative anaphora and their working memory capacity using methods that are suitable for preschool children, such as the Missing Scan Task (Renner et al, 2021; Roman et al, 2014), the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence TM -IV (CN) (Li & Zhu, 2014), and a response time analysis that measures the response duration between the offset of the test constructions and the onset of the participants’ responses (Cowan et al, 2003).…”

Measuring Cognitive Ability in Children and Adolescents: Development and Validation of a New Test Battery for Working Memory Capacity

“…A large body of research on WMC in children is available. Numerous paradigms such as simple (e.g., Ahmed et al, 2022;Panesi et al, 2022;Reynolds et al, 2022) and complex span (Gustafsson & Wolff, 2015;Peng & Fuchs, 2017), updating (e.g., Blume et al, 2022;Galeano-Keiner et al, 2022;Neubauer et al, 2019), binding (e.g., Cheng & Kibbe, 2022;Gray et al, 2017), corsi block (e.g., Cirino et al, 2018;Demetriou et al, 2014;Houwen et al, 2019), n-Back tests (e.g., Cabbage et al, 2017;Cirino et al, 2018;Watrin et al, 2022), and others (e.g., Cowan et al, 2011;Renner et al, 2021) are applied to measure WMC in children.…”