Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA.
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
Dev Sci. 2024 Nov;27(6):e13552. doi: 10.1111/desc.13552. Epub 2024 Jul 17.
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. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Memory for stimuli from multiple modalities is relevant to school performance and learning; here we investigate how attention is shared between remembering colors and tones. Participants received four colors and/or four tones for subsequent recognition on a trial, with dual modalities presented successively (0.5 s per stimulus) or concurrently (0.5 s per pair). Successive versus concurrent presentation had little effect on recognition, and the marked increase in memory performance with age did not come from dividing attention during encoding or maintenance. Children as young as first grade thus can encode and organize for later recognition colors and concurrently-presented, but unrelated, tones.
工作记忆是一种积累和重组信息的手段。研究人员长期以来一直认为，信息的自然组织方式是一次一个流。这种逻辑导致了这样的期望，即当要记住两个不同的刺激系列时，如果系列一个接一个地连续呈现，而不是同时呈现，那么表现应该更好。此外，不同的注意力限制解释导致对儿童不同年龄组中两个集合的编码能力变化有不同的期望。我们对从一年级（6-7 岁）到成年的儿童进行了测试，连续或同时呈现了一系列彩色物体和音调（一种颜色伴随着一种不相关的音调），发现无论使用哪种呈现方式，表现都同样出色。两种呈现方式的结果都与 Cowan 等人（2018 年）观察到的复杂发展模式非常吻合，他们只使用了连续呈现方式。我们发现，在不增加模态间注意力共享成本的情况下，每个模态保留材料的能力都有明显的发展提高。因此，人类至少从小学到成年早期都表现出适应和组织两个并发信息流的能力。研究亮点：来自多种模态的刺激的记忆与学校表现和学习相关；在这里，我们研究注意力如何在记忆颜色和音调之间共享。参与者在一次试验中收到四个颜色和/或四个音调，随后进行识别，双模态以连续（每个刺激 0.5 秒）或同时（每对 0.5 秒）呈现。连续呈现与同时呈现对识别的影响很小，并且记忆表现随年龄的显著提高并不是来自于在编码或保持期间分配注意力。因此，一年级的儿童就可以编码和组织用于以后识别的颜色和同时呈现但不相关的音调。
