School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom.
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2018 Jul;1424(1):161-174. doi: 10.1111/nyas.13653. Epub 2018 Apr 30.
Examining the impact of maintenance on processing speed allows us to test whether storage and processing resources are shared. Comparing these relationships in children of different ages allows further insight into whether one or multiple resources for these operations must be assumed and whether remembering is proactive throughout childhood. We tested 185 4- to 6- and 8- to 10-year-old children using adaptive complex span tasks, in which simple judgments were interleaved between to-be-remembered items. The adaptiveness of our tasks ensured that all participants frequently correctly recalled the items. If storage and processing require a single resource, and if participants serially reactivate the memoranda between processing episodes, processing response times should increase with serial position of the processing judgment within lists. We observed different within-list dynamics for each age group. Older children's processing judgments slowed gradually when more than two memory items were maintained. By contrast, younger children showed no evidence of slower processing with increasing memory load. Our results support models of working memory that assume that some common resource is responsible for verbal and spatial storage and processing. They also support the notion that remembering becomes more proactive as children mature.
考察维持对处理速度的影响可以让我们检验存储和处理资源是否共享。在不同年龄段的儿童中比较这些关系，可以进一步了解是否必须假设针对这些操作的一个或多个资源，以及在整个儿童期是否主动进行记忆。我们使用自适应复杂跨度任务测试了 185 名 4 至 6 岁和 8 至 10 岁的儿童，在这些任务中，简单的判断在要记住的项目之间交错进行。我们任务的适应性确保了所有参与者经常正确地回忆起项目。如果存储和处理需要单个资源，并且如果参与者在处理片段之间连续重新激活记忆项目，则处理响应时间应该随着列表中处理判断的顺序位置而增加。我们观察到每个年龄组的列表内动态都不同。年长的儿童在保持超过两个记忆项目时，处理判断会逐渐减慢。相比之下，年幼的儿童在增加记忆负荷时没有表现出处理速度变慢的迹象。我们的结果支持了工作记忆模型，该模型假设某些通用资源负责言语和空间存储和处理。它们还支持这样一种观点，即随着儿童的成熟，记忆会变得更加主动。
