Visual working memory in young children

Hitch, Graham J.; Halliday, Sebastian; Schaafstal, Alma; Schraagen, Jan Maarten · 1988 · Memory & Cognition

DOI: 10.3758/bf03213479

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Summary

This 1988 study by Hitch, Halliday, Schaafstal, and Schraagen investigates the nature of visual working memory in young children, specifically addressing the hypothesis that children under age 7 rely on a visual short-term store rather than the subvocal rehearsal strategies used by older children and adults. The research was motivated by evidence that younger children lack typical markers of verbal rehearsal, such as sensitivity to word length or phonemic similarity, and by the need to understand how non-rehearsing children encode visually presented materials. The authors aimed to demonstrate this dependence on visual storage and explore its characteristics by comparing 5-year-olds and 10-year-olds across five experiments. The researchers employed immediate memory tasks using drawings of familiar objects. Experiment 1 manipulated visual similarity and name length to distinguish between visual and verbal encoding. Experiment 2 examined the effects of forward versus backward recall order to assess temporal versus spatial organization of memory. Experiment 3 investigated retroactive interference (RI), testing whether recency effects in backward recall were disrupted by visual or auditory-verbal tasks. Experiment 4 confirmed the specificity of visual RI by comparing its effects on visual versus spoken word recall. Experiment 5 tested the additivity of visual similarity and visual RI effects. Participants were tested individually, with sequence lengths adjusted for age (three items for 5-year-olds, five for 10-year-olds) to avoid floor or ceiling effects. The results consistently supported the hypothesis of a distinct visual working memory system in young children. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds’ recall was significantly impaired by visual similarity but largely unaffected by name length, whereas 10-year-olds showed the opposite pattern, being sensitive to name length but not visual similarity. Experiment 2 revealed that 5-year-olds exhibited no primacy effect and performed better in backward recall, suggesting a lack of sequential verbal rehearsal and a reliance on spatial storage. In contrast, 10-year-olds showed strong primacy effects and superior forward recall, indicative of active subvocal rehearsal. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the recency effect in 5-year-olds was disrupted by visual interference but not by auditory-verbal interference, while 10-year-olds were more sensitive to auditory-verbal interference. Experiment 4 confirmed that visual interference did not impair 5-year-olds’ recall of spoken words, indicating modality-specific storage. Finally, Experiment 5 showed that visual similarity and visual interference had additive effects, suggesting they reflect different modes of accessing visuospatial information. The study concludes that young children utilize a visual working memory system that stores information based on visual characteristics such as shape and orientation, distinct from the articulatory loop used for verbal rehearsal. This visual store is separate from the phonological loop and is less dependent on temporal sequencing. These findings imply that the development of short-term memory involves a shift from reliance on visual coding to the acquisition of verbal rehearsal strategies. The research provides methodological advantages for studying visual memory by using young children, whose systems are less contaminated by verbal recoding, and offers insights into the modular nature of working memory components.

Key finding

Young children rely predominantly on visual working memory for retaining visual information, as evidenced by their sensitivity to visual similarity and visual interference, whereas older children rely more on verbal rehearsal strategies.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Sample size: 206

Provenance

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Topics

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• working memory