Valentini Beatrice, Vergauwe Evie
Faculty of Psychology and Science of Education, University of Geneva, Bureau 5158, 40 Boulevard Pont d'Arve, 1205 Genève, Switzerland.
J Intell. 2022 Dec 23;11(1):4. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence11010004.
Working memory is a limited-capacity system responsible for maintaining information that is known to dramatically develop throughout childhood and adolescence. Different maintenance mechanisms are proposed to support working memory development, among which is attentional refreshing. Attentional refreshing is assumed to improve the accessibility of working-memory representations by cycling attention from one mental representation to the other, serially. It has been suggested that the efficiency of refreshing increases between the ages of 7 and 14 years old, thereby supporting working memory development. Yet, there is not much research about refreshing in adolescence. Here, we investigate the occurrence of refreshing in 15-year-olds by using a recently-developed index, i.e., the last-presented benefit. Adolescents had to remember a list of four letters and judge whether a subsequent probe letter was present or not in the list. Reaction times to the probe were used to assess the spontaneous occurrence of refreshing. We found that, unlike young adults, 15-year-olds showed consistent speeded responses to probes matching the last-presented memory item, indicating that, in this task, adolescents did not refocus their attention away from the last memory item to initiate refreshing. Implications for working memory functioning and development are discussed.
工作记忆是一个容量有限的系统，负责维持已知在整个童年和青少年时期会显著发展的信息。人们提出了不同的维持机制来支持工作记忆的发展，其中之一是注意刷新。注意刷新被认为通过将注意力从一个心理表征依次循环到另一个心理表征来提高工作记忆表征的可及性。有人提出，在7到14岁之间，刷新效率会提高，从而支持工作记忆的发展。然而，关于青少年期刷新的研究并不多。在此，我们通过使用一种最近开发的指标，即最后呈现益处，来研究15岁青少年中刷新的发生情况。青少年必须记住一个由四个字母组成的列表，并判断随后的探测字母是否在该列表中。对探测的反应时间被用来评估刷新的自发发生情况。我们发现，与年轻人不同，15岁的青少年对与最后呈现的记忆项目匹配的探测显示出一致的快速反应，这表明，在这项任务中，青少年没有将注意力从最后一个记忆项目上重新聚焦以启动刷新。文中讨论了对工作记忆功能和发展的启示。
