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

Cowan, Nelson and Guitard, Dominic 2024. Encoding colors and tones into working memory concurrently: A developmental investigation. Developmental Science 27 (6) , e13552. 10.1111/desc.13552 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	1363-755X
Funders:	National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 July 2024
Date of Acceptance:	3 July 2024
Last Modified:	11 Nov 2024 12:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/170356

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