Verbal and Visuospatial Short‐Term and Working Memory in Children: Are They Separable?

Alloway, Tracy Packiam; Gathercole, Susan E.; Pickering, Susan J.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00968.x

Cited by 770 publications

(837 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…This set of assumptions matches well with the WM model of Baddeley (Alloway et al, 2006;Baddeley, 2001Baddeley, , 2012, and it directly predicts the factor structure of WM capacity measures (C1). (C2, C3).…”

Section: Factorial Structure Of Wm (C1)supporting

confidence: 66%

“…Yet, on a lower level of generality, separate factors for verbal-numerical and for visual-spatial WM tasks can be distinguished (Alloway, Gathercole, & Pickering, 2006;Kane et al, 2004;Oberauer et al, 2000;Shah & Miyake, 1996). Figure 12 shows results from a representative study illustrating the generality and the domain-specificity of individual differences in WM capacity.…”

Section: Round C: Individual Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What limits working memory capacity?

Oberauer

Farrell

Jarrold

et al. 2016

Psychological Bulletin

276

213

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We review the evidence for the three principal theoretical contenders that vie to explain why and how working memory capacity is limited. We examine the possibility that capacity limitations arise from temporal decay; we examine whether they might reflect a limitation in cognitive resources; and we ask whether capacity might be limited because of mutual interference of representations in working memory. We evaluate each hypothesis against a common set of findings reflecting the capacity limit: The set-size effect and its modulation by domain-specificity and heterogeneity of the memory set; the effects of unfilled retention intervals and of distractor processing in the retention interval; and the pattern of correlates of working-memory tests. We conclude that---at least for verbal memoranda---a decay explanation is untenable. A resource-based view remains tenable but has difficulty accommodating several findings. The interference approach has its own set of difficulties but accounts best for the set of findings, and therefore appears to present the most promising approach for future development.Keywords: working memory, decay, resources, interference, individual differences WM Capacity 3 What Limits Working Memory Capacity?Working memory (WM) is the system that holds mental representations available for processing. Its limited capacity is a limiting factor for the complexity of our thoughts (Halford, Cowan, & Andrews, 2007;Oberauer, 2009). Measures of WM capacity have been identified as major determinants of cognitive development in childhood (Bayliss, Jarrold, Gunn, & Baddeley, 2003) and in old age (Park et al., 2002;Salthouse, 1994), as well as of individual differences in intellectual abilities (Conway, Kane, & Engle, 2003;Jarrold & Towse, 2006). Understanding why WM capacity is limited is therefore an essential step toward understanding why human cognitive abilities are limited, why individuals differ in these abilities, and how abilities develop over the lifespan.In this article we use the term WM capacity in a descriptive sense, referring to the fact that people can hold only a limited amount of mental content available for processing. The capacity limit is usually operationalized as a limit on how much new information people can remember over short periods of time (in the order of seconds), but there are reasons to believe (discussed below) that the capacity limit also applies to people's ability to make information in the current environment simultaneously available for processing.Hypotheses about what limits WM capacity can be organized into three groups: (1) Some theories assume that representations in WM decay over time, unless decay is prevented by some form of restoration process such as rehearsal. According to this view, WM has limited capacity because only a limited amount of information can be rehearsed before it fades away into an irrecoverable state (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975;Schweickert & Boruff, 1986). (2) Alternatively, WM capacity has been characterized as a limited resourc...

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Section: Factorial Structure Of Wm (C1)supporting

confidence: 66%

Section: Round C: Individual Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

What limits working memory capacity?

Oberauer

Farrell

Jarrold

et al. 2016

Psychological Bulletin

276

213

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The Automated Working Memory Assessment has demonstrated good internal validity (Alloway, Gathercole, Pickering, 2006), convergent validity with other assessment measures of WM (Alloway, Gathercole, Kirkwood & Elliot, 2008) and a clinical questionnaire of WM deficits (Alloway, Gathercole, Kirkwood & Elliot, 2009). For this study, verbal STM was indexed by digit recall, which required the immediate serial recall of increasingly long lists of verbally presented digits.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selective Association Between Tetris Game Play and Visuospatial Working Memory: A Preliminary Investigation

Lau‐Zhu

Holmes

Butterfield

et al. 2017

Applied Cognitive Psychology

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SummaryRecent experimental and clinical research has suggested that Tetris game play can disrupt maladaptive forms of mental imagery because Tetris competes for limited cognitive resources within visuospatial working memory (WM) that contribute to imagery. Whether or not Tetris performance is selectively associated with visuospatial WM remains to be tested. In this study, young adults (N = 46) completed six standardized measures indexing verbal and non‐verbal reasoning, verbal and visuospatial short‐term memory, and verbal and visuospatial WM. They also played Tetris. Consistent with the hypothesis that visuospatial WM resources support Tetris game play, there was a significant moderate positive relationship between Tetris scores and visuospatial WM performance but no association with other cognitive ability measures. Findings suggest that Tetris game play involves both storage and processing resources within visuospatial WM. These preliminary results can inform interventions involving computer games to disrupt the development of maladaptive visual imagery, for example, intrusive memories of trauma. © 2017 The Authors. Applied Cognitive Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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“…Alloway, Gathercole, & Pickering, 2006;Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge, & Wearing, 2004). WM predicts academic attainment, indicating its importance to broader cognitive and intellectual ability (Gathercole, Pickering, Knight, & Stegmann, 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…measures where storage was the primary demand versus those where storage and additional processing were required. Given that measures of simple and complex working memory are highly related in children (Alloway et al, 2006;, we would expect both our simple and complex measures to relate to performance at early serial positions; children's ability to simply store information, and their ability to perform concurrent processing alongside storage, will both relate to task performance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The limits of visual working memory in children: Exploring prioritization and recency effects with sequential presentation.

Berry¹,

Waterman²,

Baddeley³

et al. 2018

Developmental Psychology

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Recent research has demonstrated that, when instructed to prioritize a serial position in visual working memory, adults are able to boost performance for this selected item, at a cost to nonprioritized items (e.g. Hu et al., 2014). While executive control appears to play an important role in this ability, the increased likelihood of recalling the most recently presented item (i.e. the recency effect) is relatively automatic, possibly driven by perceptual mechanisms. In three experiments 7 to 10-year-old's ability to prioritize items in working memory was investigated using a sequential visual task (total N = 208). The relationship between individual differences in working memory and performance on the experimental task was also explored. Participants were unable to prioritize the first (Experiments 1 & 2) or final (Experiment 3) item in a 3-item sequence, while large recency effects for the final item were consistently observed across all experiments. The absence of a priority boost across three experiments indicates that children may not have the necessary executive resources to prioritize an item within a visual sequence, when directed to do so. In contrast, the consistent recency boosts for the final item indicate that children show automatic memory benefits for the most recently encountered stimulus. Finally, for the baseline condition in which children were instructed to remember all three items equally, additional working memory measures predicted performance at the first and second but not the third serial position, further supporting the proposed automaticity of the recency effect in visual working memory.

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Verbal and Visuospatial Short‐Term and Working Memory in Children: Are They Separable?

Cited by 770 publications

References 72 publications

What limits working memory capacity?

What limits working memory capacity?

Selective Association Between Tetris Game Play and Visuospatial Working Memory: A Preliminary Investigation

The limits of visual working memory in children: Exploring prioritization and recency effects with sequential presentation.

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