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

Berry, Ed D. J.; Waterman, Amanda H.; Baddeley, Alan; Hitch, Graham J.; Allen, Richard J. · 2017 · Developmental Psychology

DOI: 10.1037/dev0000427

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Summary

This study investigates the developmental limits of visual working memory (WM) in children, specifically examining their ability to strategically prioritize items within a sequential display and the presence of automatic recency effects. While adults can boost performance for prioritized items through executive control, it remains unclear whether children possess the necessary executive resources to do so. The research aims to dissociate top-down, goal-directed prioritization from bottom-up, perceptually driven recency effects, which are hypothesized to be automatic and thus present in children. The researchers conducted three experiments with a total of 208 participants aged 7 to 10 years. Participants completed a sequential visual WM task involving three colored shapes presented one after another. In baseline conditions, children were instructed to remember all items equally. In prioritization conditions, they were instructed to focus specifically on either the first item (Experiments 1 and 2) or the final item (Experiment 3). Performance was measured by accuracy in recalling the color of probed items. Additionally, individual differences in WM were assessed using simple and complex verbal and visuospatial tasks, including forward and backward digit recall, the Corsi block task, and an odd-one-out task. The results indicated that children were unable to prioritize the first or final item in the sequence, showing no performance boost for prioritized items compared to baseline conditions. This absence of a priority boost suggests that children lack the executive resources required for strategic allocation of attention in visual WM. However, a large and consistent recency effect was observed across all experiments, with significantly higher accuracy for the final item in the sequence. This recency effect was unaffected by prioritization instructions, supporting the hypothesis that it is an automatic process driven by perceptual mechanisms rather than executive control. Furthermore, individual differences in WM capacity predicted performance at the first and second serial positions but not the third, reinforcing the distinction between resource-dependent early positions and the automatic final position. These findings imply that while children exhibit automatic memory benefits for recently encountered stimuli, they do not yet possess the mature executive control necessary to strategically prioritize specific items within a visual sequence. The study highlights a developmental gap in the strategic use of attention in visual WM, suggesting that the ability to actively manage limited capacity through top-down control emerges later than automatic recency benefits. This distinction is crucial for understanding how WM develops and how it supports broader cognitive and academic abilities in childhood.

Key finding

Children aged 7 to 10 cannot strategically prioritize items in visual working memory but exhibit a robust, automatic recency effect for the final item in a sequence.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Sample size: 208

Provenance

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Topics

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• working memory