Encoding colors and tones into working memory concurrently: A developmental investigation.

Working memory serves as a means to accumulate information and reorganize it. Researchers have long assumed that the natural organization of information is one stream at a time. This logic leads to the expectation that, when two different series of stimuli are to be remembered, performance should be superior if the series are presented one before the other in succession, rather than concurrently. Moreover, different accounts of attentional limits lead to different expectations for the change in the ability to encode two sets across age groups in childhood. Testing children from first grade (6-7 years) to adulthood, we presented sequences of colored objects and tones in succession or concurrently (with one color accompanying an unrelated tone) and found that performance was equally good no matter which presentation method was used. The results for both presentation methods closely matched the intricate pattern of development observed by Cowan et al. (2018), who used successive presentation only. We found marked developmental improvement in the ability to retain materials in each modality without an increasing cost of attention-sharing between modalities. Humans at least from the elementary school years through young adulthood thus display an ability to accommodate and organize two concurrent streams of information. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Memory for stimuli from multiple modalities is relevant to school performance and learning; here we investigate how attention is shared between remembering colors and tones. Participants received four colors and/or four tones for subsequent recognition on a trial, with dual modalities presented successively (0.5 s per stimulus) or concurrently (0.5 s per pair). Successive versus concurrent presentation had little effect on recognition, and the marked increase in memory performance with age did not come from dividing attention during encoding or maintenance. Children as young as first grade thus can encode and organize for later recognition colors and concurrently-presented, but unrelated, tones.

Working memory limitations constrain visual episodic long-term memory at both specific and gist levels of representation.

Limitations in one's capacity to encode information in working memory (WM) constrain later access to that information in long-term memory (LTM). The present study examined whether these WM constraints on episodic LTM are limited to specific representations of past episodes or also extend to gist representations. Across three experiments, young adult participants (n = 40 per experiment) studied objects in set sizes of two or six items, either sequentially (Experiments 1a and 1b) or simultaneously (Experiment 2). They then completed old/new recognition tests immediately after each sequence (WM tests). After a long study phase, participants completed LTM conjoint recognition tests, featuring old but untested items from the WM phase, lures that were similar to studied items at gist but not specific levels of representation, and new items unrelated to studied items at both specific and gist levels of representation. Results showed that LTM estimates of specific and gist memory representations from a multinomial-processing-tree model were reduced for items encoded under supra-capacity set sizes (six items) relative to within-capacity set sizes (two items). These results suggest that WM encoding capacity limitations constrain episodic LTM at both specific and gist levels of representation, at least for visual objects. The ability to retrieve from LTM each type of representation for a visual item is contingent on the degree to which the item could be encoded in WM.

Short-term retention of words as a function of encoding depth.

The traditional short- and long-term storage view of information processing and the levels-of-processing view both discuss the forgetting of information over time. In the traditional stage view, there is loss of at least poorly encoded information across several seconds when the information cannot be rehearsed (e.g., Ricker et al., 2020, Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46, 60-76). In the levels-of-processing approach, information that is encoded in a shallow manner is lost more quickly over time than deeply-encoded information (Craik & Lockhart, 1972, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684.). Previous studies of the depth of encoding, however, have mostly been conducted using delayed tests, so there are few studies directly comparing the rate of forgetting over time for information as a function of different depths of encoding. We manipulated the level of processing with immediate recall in a modified Brown-Peterson task. An effect of the level of processing was robust, but evidence of forgetting across retention intervals was not always observed. When encoding time was curtailed (in Experiments 3 and 4), we found main effects of both the level of processing and the retention interval, but no interaction between the two variables. The results suggest that the depth-of-encoding effect may occur during the initial encoding of items, but without differential forgetting within the range of retention intervals that we examined (0-18 s), in contrast to the suggestion by Craik and Lockhart. Further work is needed to determine whether the depth-of-processing effect would grow over longer intervals.

A lifespan study of the confidence-accuracy relation in working memory and episodic long-term memory.

The relation between an individual's memory accuracy and reported confidence in their memories can indicate self-awareness of memory strengths and weaknesses. We provide a lifespan perspective on this confidence-accuracy relation, based on two previously published experiments with 320 participants, including children aged 6-13, young adults aged 18-27, and older adults aged 65-77, across tests of working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM). Participants studied visual items in arrays of varying set sizes and completed item recognition tests featuring 6-point confidence ratings either immediately after studying each array (WM tests) or following a long period of study events (LTM tests). Confidence-accuracy characteristic analyses showed that accuracy improved with increasing confidence for all age groups and in both WM and LTM tests. These findings reflect a universal ability across the lifespan to use awareness of the strengths and limitations of one's memories to adjust reported confidence. Despite this age invariance in the confidence-accuracy relation, however, young children were more prone to high-confidence memory errors than other groups in tests of WM, whereas older adults were more susceptible to high-confidence false alarms in tests of LTM. Thus, although participants of all ages can assess when their memories are weaker or stronger, individuals with generally weaker memories are less adept at this confidence-accuracy calibration. Findings also speak to potential different sources of high-confidence memory errors for young children and older adults, relative to young adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Short- and long-term influences of repeated speech examples on segmentation in an unfamiliar language analog.

Because segments in fluent speech (e.g., words and phrases) are not reliably separated by pauses, a key task when listening to an unfamiliar language is to parse the incoming speech into segments to be learned. We aim to understand how working memory contributes to that segmentation learning. One cue to segmentation occurs when a segment is repeated in varying contexts. Cowan (Acta Psychologica, 77(2), 121-135, 1991) explored a language analog to study how segmentation occurs during immediate memory of speech, and found effects of segment presentation frequency, stimulus length, and serial position. Here we ask whether those effects extend from working memory to long-term memory. Overlapping segments were presented (e.g., mah bar slo mi and slo mi geh), varying numbers of times (presentation frequencies) to determine how varying the schedule of repetition patterns would affect perception of a unified test pattern formed from the two of them (e.g., mah bar slo mi geh). These constructions provide an analogy to how segments occur in varying contexts in speech. Participants were to indicate where they heard the boundaries between syllables. In immediate memory, the perceived boundaries more often reflected the most frequently presented pattern, and often reflected both pattern boundaries (in this example, mah bar / slo mi / geh). In a long-term memory follow-up, however, the original presentation frequencies only mattered for certain short test pattern configurations. We suggest that working memory for speech, without a semantic component, may be an incomplete basis to learn longer segments in an unfamiliar language.

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.

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.

Can synchronised tones facilitate immediate memory for printed lists?

In verbal list recall, adding features redundant with the ones to be recalled theoretically could assist recall, by providing additional retrieval cues, or it could impede recall, by draining attention away from the features to be recalled. We examined young adults' immediate memory of lists of printed digits when these lists were sometimes accompanied by synchronised, concurrent tones, one per digit. Unlike most previous irrelevant-sound effects, the tones were not asynchronous with the printed items, which can corrupt the episodic record, and did not repeat within a list. Memory of the melody might bring to mind the associated digits like lyrics in a song. Sometimes there were instructions to sing the digits covertly in the tone pitches. In three experiments, there was no evidence that these methods enhanced memory. Instead, there appeared to be a distraction effect from the synchronised tones, as in the irrelevant sound effect with asynchronised tones.

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.

Generalization of Skill for a Working Memory Recognition Procedure in Children: The Benefit of Starting with Easy Materials.

When children practice a new task, they need to learn both the task procedure and the materials tested. It is often unclear if improvements with practice reflect learning of the task procedure or familiarity with the materials. We sought to examine learning of the task procedure by switching from one set of materials to another in a working memory recognition task. We recruited 70 children (34 female, M = 11.27 years, SD = 0.62, ranging from 10.08 to 12.39) in the United States who were to remember sequences of orientations and of shapes for recognition immediately following the list. Half of the children began with orientation, an easier task, and the other half began with difficult-to-name shapes, a harder task. When children began with the easier task, the acquisition of the recognition task skill in the easy condition transferred to the more difficult task, optimizing the mean performance across tasks. Transfer was less potent when children began with the more difficult task. The results showed that sufficient practice is crucial to avoid poor initial performance, which might be important for the student's rate of progress and task engagement.

Discrepancies in Objective and Subjective Cognition in Middle-Aged and Older Adults: Does Personality Matter?

Associations between subjective cognition and current objective functioning are inconclusive. Given known associations between personality and cognition, this study tested whether personality moderates associations between subjective memory and objective cognition in middle-aged and older adults. Participants (N = 62, M age = 63.8, SD = 7.7, 33 men) completed assessments of personality (Big Five Inventory-10), subjective memory (Cognitive Failures Questionnaire [CFQ-memory]), and objective cognition (processing speed, attention, inhibition [Stroop], working memory [Sternberg], set-shifting [Wisconsin Card Sorting Task]). Multiple regressions and simple slopes analyses examined whether personality moderates associations between subjective memory and objective cognition, controlling for age, number of medical conditions, and household income. Extraversion moderated associations between processing speed and CFQ-memory. Agreeableness moderated associations between set-shifting and CFQ-memory. Among individuals with higher extraversion and lower agreeableness, objectively worse cognition was associated with the fewest memory complaints. Findings suggest personality may impact the discrepancies between subjective memory and objective cognition in mid-to-late life.

Why does visual working memory ability improve with age: More objects, more feature detail, or both? A registered report.

We investigated how visual working memory (WM) develops with age across the early elementary school period (6-7 years), early adolescence (11-13 years), and early adulthood (18-25 years). The work focuses on changes in two parameters: the number of objects retained at least in part, and the amount of feature-detail remembered for such objects. Some evidence suggests that, while infants can remember up to three objects, much like adults, young children only remember around two objects. This curious, nonmonotonic trajectory might be explained by differences in the level of feature-detail required for successful performance in infant versus child/adult memory paradigms. Here, we examined if changes in one of two parameters (the number of objects, and the amount of detail retained for each object) or both of them together can explain the development of visual WM ability as children grow older. To test it, we varied the amount of feature-detail participants need to retain. In the baseline condition, participants saw an array of objects and simply were to indicate whether an object was present in a probed location or not. This phase begun with a titration procedure to adjust each individual's array size to yield about 80% correct. In other conditions, we tested memory of not only location but also additional features of the objects (color, and sometimes also orientation). Our results suggest that capacity growth across ages is expressed by both improved location-memory (whether there was an object in a location) and feature completeness of object representations.

Strategic adaptation to dual-task in verbal working memory: Potential routes for theory integration.

How working memory supports dual-task performance is the focus of a long-standing debate. Most previous research on this topic has focused on participant performance data. In three experiments, we investigated whether changes in participant-reported strategies across single- and dual-task conditions might help resolve this debate by offering new insights that lead to fruitful integration of theories rather than perpetuating debate by attempting to identify which theory best fits the data. Results indicated that articulatory suppression was associated with reduced reports of the use of rehearsal and clustering strategies but to an increase of the reported use of a visual strategy. Elaboration and clustering strategies were reported less for memory under dual task compared with single task. Under both dual task and articulatory suppression, more participants reported attempting to remember fewer memory items than were presented (memory reduction strategy). For arithmetic verification, articulatory suppression and dual task resulted in a reduction in reports of a counting strategy and an increase in reports of a retrieval strategy for arithmetic knowledge. It is argued that experimenters should not assume that participants perform the same task in the same way under different experimental conditions and that carefulty investigation of how participants change their strategies in response to changes in experimental conditions has considerable potential for resolving theoretical challenges. It is argued further that this approach points toward the value of attempting to integrate rather than proliferate theories of working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Deconfounding serial recall: Response timing and the overarching role of grouping.

We used the timing of serial recall in several situations to reveal important aspects of recall groupings that participants construct and the reasons those groupings occur. We examined the timing of responses in the recall of digit strings within two published experiments. Cowan, Saults, Elliott, and Moreno (2002) examined memory for nine-item lists in a way that deconfounded the presentation modality, input versus output serial position (using a varied starting point of recall), memory load from items not yet recalled (using whole vs. partial recall), and the presence or absence of the temporal grouping of the lists into triads. Accuracy was strikingly different in the two modalities, with grouping drastically changing recall of acoustic lists but with little difference between grouped versus ungrouped visual lists. Despite the modality difference in recall, the present timing results show that participants imposed a similar grouped structure in recall for both modalities. When errors were made, the original grouping structure still was maintained in the output timing. Cowan et al. (2005, Experiment 1) presented ungrouped acoustic lists of varying lengths in a span task. In this case, there was never a grouping structure presented to the participant and the accuracy data did not reveal evidence of grouping, but we show clear grouping in the timing structure. This grouping structure varied with both the list length and an individual's span. Timing in both experiments shows that a grouping structure is imposed on responses in a manner that is dependent on several factors not present in the stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention allocation between item and order information in short-term memory.

In immediate memory for verbal lists, recently it has been shown that participants can choose to carry out encoding that prioritises readiness for an item test at some cost to order information or, conversely, that prioritises readiness for an order test at a cost to item information. Here, we ask whether participants can control attention to items and order in a graded fashion. We examined this issue by manipulating the percentage of order or item test trials participants would receive in a block (for each type of test, 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of the trials in a block). Overall, the results revealed that participants were able to allocate their attention in a fine-grained manner that took into account the trial distribution within the block. However, there was a difference between the effects of allocating attention to item versus order. Divided attention, compared with full attention to one attribute, had an asymmetry, such that divided attention impaired order performance more than item performance. The exact point at which this asymmetry could be seen differed between two experiments, which included different item tests (fragment completion vs. free recall). The results suggest a common resource for item and order encoding and/or retention in working memory, which can be voluntarily allocated to different mixtures of these two attributes.

The tradeoff between item and order information in short-term memory does not depend on encoding time.

Participants can optimize encoding of an immediate verbal memory test for item or for order information, or they can try to be ready for either type of test. Dividing encoding between both kinds of information, however, comes at a cost. Recently, it has been shown that the cost is more severe for order information compared to item information (Guitard et al., 2022). Here, for the first time, we evaluated which factor can better account for this asymmetry by contrasting two hypotheses. According to a rate hypothesis, divided attention affects the rate of encoding more for order than for items. According to an alternative, asymptote hypothesis, divided attention does not affect the rates but diminishes the endpoint, or asymptotic level, of order encoding more than item encoding. In three experiments to distinguish these hypotheses, participants prepared for an item fragment completion test, an order reconstruction test, or both types of tests, in trials with different durations of presentation. Overall, our results were better accounted for by a model which assumes that dividing attention between preparation for item and order testing affects the asymptote of encoding more for order than for items, with no effects on the rates of order or item encoding compared to preparation for a single test. The findings not only replicate our prior results, but also demonstrate that the allocation of attention to item or order processing can be disentangled from the time on task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Phonological Working Memory and Sentence Production in School-Age Children with Typical Language, Dyslexia, and Comorbid Dyslexia and Developmental Language Disorder.

PURPOSE: Little is known about the relationship between sentence production and phonological working memory in school-age children. To fill this gap, we examined how strongly these constructs correlate. We also compared diagnostic groups' working memory abilities to see if differences co-occurred with qualitative differences in their sentences. METHOD: We conducted Bayesian analyses on data from seven- to nine-year-old children (n = 165 typical language, n = 81 dyslexia-only, n = 43 comorbid dyslexia and developmental language disorder). We correlated sentence production and working memory scores and conducted t tests between groups' working memory scores and sentence length, lexical diversity, and complexity. RESULTS: Correlations were positive but weak. The dyslexic and typical groups had dissimilar working memory and comparable sentence quality. The dyslexic and comorbid groups had comparable working memory but dissimilar sentence quality. CONCLUSION: Contrary to literature-based predictions, phonological working memory and sentence production are weakly related in school-age children.

Unconsciously registered items reduce working memory capacity.

The assumption that the contents of consciousness correspond to those of working memory (WM) is challenged by evidence that stimuli masked from awareness can be retained for several seconds (Soto et al., 2011; Bergström & Eriksson, 2015). To assess whether conscious and unconscious items compete in a unitary WM store we conducted an experiment in which some of the memory items in an array were masked from conscious sight using continuous flash suppression (CFS) while others remained visible. After a retention interval, participants decided whether the probed item (either masked or visible) had changed its orientation. Behavioral results indicated that change detection for visible items was significantly impaired when masked items were present, suggesting that masked items either displaced or reduced the precision of visible items in WM. However, change detection for masked items was at chance levels, indicating that these items were not stored. The unsuccessful attempt to encode them may have drawn upon a common pool of attentional resources needed to retain or retrieve visible items. Contralateral Delay Activity, an EEG index of net WM load, failed to temporally localize this interference.

Tradeoffs between Item and Order Information in Short-Term Memory.

Recently, Guitard et al. (2021) used a two-list procedure and varied the kind of encoding carried out for each list (item or order encoding). They found dual-list impairment on an order test was consistently greater when the other list was also encoded for an order test, compared to when it was in the presence of another list encoded for an item test. They also found a dual-list cost relative to one list for both order and item information. Here we address the bases of the interference costs with a novel task in which, prior to each list presentation, participants are instructed to expect an item fragment completion test, an order reconstruction test, or either type of test. In five experiments, we contrast two competing accounts of item and order processing, the conflicting representation hypothesis and the common resource hypothesis. An asymmetry with larger dual-attention costs on order compared to item tests was found, with the effect magnitude changing with task conditions. Our results support a version of the common resource hypothesis in which both item and order processing occur no matter which test is expected, but in which additional processing is divided between item and order codes in a manner that depends on task demands.

The proportion of working memory items recoverable from long-term memory remains fixed despite adult aging.

We explored whether long-term memory (LTM) retrieval is constrained by working memory (WM) limitations, in 80 younger and 80 older adults. Participants performed a WM task with images of unique everyday items, presented at varying set sizes. Subsequently, we tested participants' LTM for items from the WM task and examined the ratio of LTM/WM retention. While older adults' WM and LTM were generally poorer than that of younger adults, their LTM deficit was no greater than what was predicted from their WM performance. The ability to encode WM information into LTM appeared immune to age-related cognitive decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).