Working memory constrains long-term memory in children and adults: memory of objects and bindings

Forsberg, Alicia, Guitard, Dominic, Adams, Eryn J., Pattanakul, Duangporn and Cowan, Nelson 2023. Working memory constrains long-term memory in children and adults: memory of objects and bindings. Journal of intelligence 11 (5) , 94. 10.3390/jintelligence11050094

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Abstract

We explored how individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity affected subsequent long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Unlike past studies, we tested WM and LTM not only for items, but also for item–color bindings. Our sample included 82 elementary school children and 42 young adults. The participants performed aWMtask with images of unique everyday items presented sequentially at varying set sizes in different colors. Later, we tested LTM for items and item–color bindings from the WM task. The WM load during encoding constrained LTM, and participants with a higher WM capacity retrieved more items in the LTM test. Even when accounting for young children’s poor item memory by considering only the items that they did remember, they exhibited an exacerbated difficulty with remembering item–color bindings in WM. Their LTM binding performance, however, as a proportion of remembered objects, was comparable to that of older children and adults. The WM binding performance was better during sub-span encoding loads, but with no clear transfer of this benefit to LTM. Overall, LTM item memory performance was constrained by individual and age-related WM limitations, but with mixed consequences for binding. We discuss the theoretical, practical, and developmental implications of this WM-to-LTM bottleneck.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	15 May 2023
Date of Acceptance:	21 April 2023
Last Modified:	17 May 2023 13:40
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/159499

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