Berry Ed D J, Allen Richard J, Mon-Williams Mark, Waterman Amanda H
School of Psychology, University of Leeds.
Cogn Sci. 2019 Aug;43(8):e12770. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12770.
Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are offloaded onto the environment to help task performance. Here, we investigate an application of this approach with children, in particular children with poor working memory. Participants were required to remember and recall sequences of colors by placing colored blocks in the correct serial order. In one condition the blocks were arranged to facilitate cognitive offloading (i.e., grouped by color), whereas in the other condition they were arranged randomly. Across two experiments (total N = 166) the ordered condition improved task performance for children with low working memory ability. In addition, participants in Experiment 2 rated the difficulty of the two arrangements and performed a further condition in which they were given an opportunity to freely arrange the blocks before completing the task. Despite performing better in the ordered condition, children with low working memory ability did not rate the ordered arrangement as easier, nor did they choose an ordered arrangement when given the opportunity to do so. This research shows that cognitive offloading can also be a useful process in populations other than typical adults, and the implications of this work for supporting children with poor working memory are discussed.
研究表明,成年人能够进行认知卸载,即将内部过程卸载到环境中以辅助任务执行。在此,我们研究这种方法在儿童,尤其是工作记忆较差的儿童中的应用。参与者需要通过将彩色积木按正确的顺序排列来记住并回忆颜色序列。在一种条件下,积木被排列成便于认知卸载的形式(即按颜色分组),而在另一种条件下它们是随机排列的。在两个实验(总样本量N = 166)中,有序条件提高了工作记忆能力低的儿童的任务表现。此外,实验2中的参与者对两种排列的难度进行了评分,并进行了另一种条件的实验,即他们在完成任务前有机会自由排列积木。尽管在有序条件下表现更好,但工作记忆能力低的儿童并没有认为有序排列更容易,当有机会这样做时他们也没有选择有序排列。这项研究表明,认知卸载在非典型成年人以外的人群中也可能是一个有用的过程,并讨论了这项工作对支持工作记忆差的儿童的意义。