Children's long-term retention is directly constrained by their working memory capacity limitations

Forsberg, Alice, Guitard, Dominic, Adams, Eryn J, Pattankul, Duangporn and Cowan, Nelson 2022. Children's long-term retention is directly constrained by their working memory capacity limitations. Developmental Science 25 (2) , 13164. 10.1111/desc.13164

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Abstract

We explored the causal role of individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity in long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Our sample of 160 participants included 120 children (6–13-years old) and 40 young adults (18–24 years). 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. Using these measures, we estimated the ratio at which items successfully held in WM were recognized in LTM. While WM and LTM generally improved with age, the ability to transfer information from WM to LTM appeared consistent between age groups. Moreover, individual differences in WM capacity appeared to predict LTM encoding. Overall, these results suggested that LTM performance was constrained by experimental, individual, and age-related WM limitations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this WM-to-LTM bottleneck.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	1363-755X
Date of Acceptance:	30 July 2021
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2022 11:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/153405

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