Cognitive Offloading: Structuring the Environment to Improve Children's Working Memory Task Performance.

Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are offloaded onto the environment to help task performance. Here, we investigate an application of this approach with children, in particular children with poor working memory. Participants were required to remember and recall sequences of colors by placing colored blocks in the correct serial order. In one condition the blocks were arranged to facilitate cognitive offloading (i.e., grouped by color), whereas in the other condition they were arranged randomly. Across two experiments (total N = 166) the ordered condition improved task performance for children with low working memory ability. In addition, participants in Experiment 2 rated the difficulty of the two arrangements and performed a further condition in which they were given an opportunity to freely arrange the blocks before completing the task. Despite performing better in the ordered condition, children with low working memory ability did not rate the ordered arrangement as easier, nor did they choose an ordered arrangement when given the opportunity to do so. This research shows that cognitive offloading can also be a useful process in populations other than typical adults, and the implications of this work for supporting children with poor working memory are discussed.

The Effect of a Verbal Concurrent Task on Visual Precision in Working Memory.

By investigating the effect of individualized verbal load on a visual working memory task, we investigated whether working memory is better captured by modality-specific stores or a general attentional resource. A visual measure was used that allows for the precision of representations in working memory to be quantified. Bayesian analyses were employed to contrast the likelihood of our data assuming a small versus a large effect, as predicted by the differing accounts. We found evidence that the effect of verbal load on visual precision and binary feature recall was small. The results were indeterminate for the size of the dual task effect on verbal accuracy and the probability of recalling a continuous target feature. These results, in part, support a multiple component account of working memory. An analysis of how the chosen effect intervals affect the results is also reported, highlighting the importance of making specific predictions in the literature.

Are there multiple ways to direct attention in working memory?

In visual working memory tasks, memory for an item is enhanced if participants are told that the item is relatively more valuable than others presented within the same trial. Experiment 1 explored whether these probe value boosts (termed prioritization effects in previous literature) are affected by probe frequency (i.e., how often the more valuable item is tested). Participants were presented with four colored shapes sequentially and asked to recall the color of one probed item following a delay. They were informed that the first item was more valuable (differential probe value) or as valuable as the other items (equal probe value), and that this item would be tested more frequently (differential probe frequency) or as frequently (equal probe frequency) as the other items. Probe value and probe frequency boosts were observed at the first position, though both were accompanied by costs to other items. Probe value and probe frequency boosts were additive, suggesting the manipulations yield independent effects. Further supporting this, experiment 2 revealed that probe frequency boosts are not reliant on executive resources, directly contrasting with previous findings regarding probe value. Taken together, these outcomes suggest there may be several ways in which attention can be directed in working memory.

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

Recent research has demonstrated that, when instructed to prioritize a serial position in visual working memory (WM), adults are able to boost performance for this selected item, at a cost to nonprioritized items (e.g., Hu, Hitch, Baddeley, Zhang, & Allen, 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 3 Experiments 7 to 10 year-old's ability to prioritize items in WM was investigated using a sequential visual task (total N = 208). The relationship between individual differences in WM and performance on the experimental task was also explored. Participants were unable to prioritize the first (Experiments 1 and 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 3 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 3 items equally, additional WM 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 WM. (PsycINFO Database Record