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Younger children have more difficulty in sharing attention between two concurrent tasks than do older participants, but in addition to this developmental change, we documented changes in the nature of attention sharing. We studied children 6-8 and 10-14 years old and college students (in all, 104 women and 76 men; 3% Hispanic, 3% Black or African American, 3% Asian, 7% multiracial, and 84% White). On each dual-task trial, the participant received an array of colored squares to be retained for a subsequent probe recognition test and then an easy or more difficult signal requiring a quick response (a speeded task, clicking a key on the same side of the screen as the signal or the opposite side). Finally, each trial ended with the presentation of the array item recognition probe and the participant's response to it. In our youngest age group (6-8 years), array memory was often displaced by the speeded task performed under load, especially when it was the opposite-side task, but speeded-task accuracies were unaffected by the presence of an array memory load. In contrast, in older participants (10-14 years and college students), the memory load was maintained better, with some cost to the speeded task. With maturity, participants were better able to adopt a proactive stance in which not only present processing demands but also upcoming demands were taken into account, allowing them to balance the demands of the two tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Experimental measures of working memory that minimize rehearsal and maximize attentional control best predict higher-order cognitive abilities. These tasks fundamentally differ from clinically administered span tasks, which do not control strategy use. Participants engaged in concurrent articulation (to limit rehearsal) or concurrent tapping (to limit attentional refreshing) during forward and backward serial recall with each of three distinct stimulus sets: digits, line drawings of common objects, and images of nonsense symbols. The span tasks used common clinical stopping and scoring procedures. Scores were highest for digits and lowest for novel symbols in all combinations of direction and concurrent task. Furthermore, concurrent articulation and concurrent tapping interfered with backward recall to the same degree. Together, these findings indicate that clinically administered immediate serial recall tasks depend on both rehearsal and long-term lexical knowledge making it difficult to use these tasks to separate problems in language ability from problems in attention.

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall (Elliott et al., 2021) revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought (Flavell et al., 1966), but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child’s spontaneous use of labels during a visually-presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7-year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory.

Work by Flavell, Beach, and Chinsky indicated a change in the spontaneous production of overt verbalization behaviors when comparing young children (age 5) with older children (age 10). Despite the critical role that this evidence of a change in verbalization behaviors plays in modern theories of cognitive development and working memory, there has been only one other published near replication of this work. In this Registered Replication Report, we relied on researchers from 17 labs who contributed their results to a larger and more comprehensive sample of children. We assessed memory performance and the presence or absence of verbalization behaviors of young children at different ages and determined that the original pattern of findings was largely upheld: Older children were more likely to verbalize, and their memory spans improved. We confirmed that 5- and 6-year-old children who verbalized recalled more than children who did not verbalize. However, unlike Flavell et al., substantial proportions of our 5- and 6-year-old samples overtly verbalized at least sometimes during the picture memory task. In addition, continuous increase in overt verbalization from 7 to 10 years old was not consistently evident in our samples. These robust findings should be weighed when considering theories of cognitive development, particularly theories concerning when verbal rehearsal emerges and relations between speech and memory.

Sequences of phonologically similar words are more difficult to remember than phonologically distinct sequences. This study investigated whether this difficulty arises in the acoustic similarity of auditory stimuli or in the corresponding phonological labels in memory. Participants reconstructed sequences of words which were degraded with a vocoder. We manipulated the phonological similarity of response options across two groups. One group was trained to map stimulus words onto phonologically similar response labels which matched the recorded word; the other group was trained to map words onto a set of plausible responses which were mismatched from the original recordings but were selected to have less phonological overlap. Participants trained on the matched responses were able to learn responses with less training and recall sequences more accurately than participants trained on the mismatched responses, even though the mismatched responses were more phonologically distinct from one another and participants were unaware of the mismatch. The relative difficulty of recalling items in the correct position was the same across both sets of response labels. Mismatched responses impaired recall accuracy across all positions except the final item in each list. These results are consistent with the idea that increased difficulty of mapping acoustic stimuli onto phonological forms impairs serial recall. Increased mapping difficulty could impair retention of memoranda and impede consolidation into phonological forms, which would impair recall in adverse listening conditions.

According to the interference-by-process mechanism of auditory distraction, irrelevant changing sounds interfere with subvocal articulatory-motor sequencing during rehearsal. However, previous attempts to limit rehearsal with concurrent articulation and examine the residual irrelevant sound effect have limited both cumulative rehearsal as well as the initial assembly of articulatory-phonological labels. The current research decomposed rehearsal into these two levels of articulatory-phonological sequencing: silent concurrent articulation limits the availability of both serial repetition and articulatory-phonological recoding; rapid serial visual presentation allows for articulatory-phonological recoding but presents items too quickly for cumulative serial repetition. As predicted by the interference-by-process account, concurrent articulation -- but not rapid serial visual presentation -- reduced the irrelevant sound effect. Not only did the irrelevant sound effect persist in the face of rapid serial visual presentation, a steady-state effect also emerged. These findings indicate that irrelevant sounds interfere with both serial processing at the level of articulatory-motor planning at the word level as well as in the formation of item-to-item associations created via serial repetition of complete items. Moreover, these findings highlight the benefits of articulatory-phonological recoding - independent of pure rehearsal -- within serial recall.

Purpose The aim of this study was to quantify the portion of variance in several measures suggested to be indicative of peripheral noise-induced cochlear synaptopathy and hidden hearing disorder that can be attributed to individual cognitive capacity. Method Regression and relative importance analysis was used to model several behavioral and physiological measures of hearing in 32 adults ranging in age from 20 to 74 years. Predictors for the model were hearing sensitivity and performance on a number of cognitive tasks. Results There was a significant influence of cognitive capacity on several measures of cochlear synaptopathy and hidden hearing disorder. These measures include frequency modulation detection threshold, time-compressed word recognition in quiet and reverberation, and the strength of the frequency-following response of the speech-evoked auditory brainstem response. Conclusions Measures of hearing that involve temporal processing are significantly influenced by cognitive abilities, specifically, short-term and working memory capacity, executive function, and attention. Research using measures of temporal processing to diagnose peripheral disorders, such as noise-induced synaptopathy, need to consider cognitive influence even in a young, healthy population.

Purpose The current study adopts a systematic approach to the examination of working memory components in pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users by separately assessing contributions of encoding, storage, and retrieval. Method Forty-nine long-term CI users and 56 typically hearing controls completed forward and backward span tasks with 3 stimulus sets: visually presented digits, pictures of concrete nouns, and novel symbols. In addition, measures associated with each memory stage were collected: Rapid digit naming provided an estimate of phonological recoding speed, nonword repetition assessed the robustness of representations within phonological storage, and vocabulary knowledge (as measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test; Dunn & Dunn, 1997 ) estimated redintegration abilities during retrieval. Results Linear mixed modeling revealed that digit naming speed and vocabulary knowledge were consistently related to short-term and working memory span in both CI users and typically hearing controls. However, nonword repetition only contributed to the model for short-term memory. Conclusions Nonword repetition, an index of phonological storage, explained little of the individual variability inworking memory differences between CI users and typically hearing peers. On the other hand, individual differences in encoding and retrieval explained a significant amount of outcome variability in both short-term and working memory tasks. Differences between CI users and typically hearing peers in working memory therefore appear to reflect process components of encoding and retrieval and not simply differences in memory storage. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7849394

As children mature, their ability to remember information improves. This improvement has been linked to changes in verbal control processes such as rehearsal. Rehearsal processes are thought to undergo a quantitative shift around 7 years of age; however, direct measurement of rehearsal is difficult. We investigated a measure of rehearsal ability in children and compared this measurement to serial recall performance in the presence of auditory distractors. Theories of auditory distraction effects in children rely upon a combination of attentionally based and serial-order-based processes (Elliott et al. in Journal of Memory and Language, 88, 39-50, 2016); the present work contributes to the understanding of auditory distraction effects by measuring both types of processes within one study. Children completed an individually adjusted serial-recall task with auditory distractors. To assess rehearsal, each child's proportionalized articulatory difference (PAD) score was calculated from performance on adaptive digit span tasks performed in quiet and under articulatory suppression (see also Jarrold & Citroen in Developmental Psychology, 49, 837-847, 2013). Attentional processes were measured in two ways: first, by using complex span tasks, and second, by children's vulnerability to disruption in the context of irrelevant sound. The results indicated that the rehearsal measure was significantly related to the auditory distraction effect, but this relation was isolated to the attentional-diversion component of the irrelevant-sound effect. The results provide preliminary evidence that children consume attentional resources during rehearsal. Moreover, irrelevant sound disrupts children's rehearsal not solely through automatic, obligatory conflict. Rather, irrelevant sound diverts children's attention, which prevents attentional resources from supporting rehearsal processes.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to report how verbal rehearsal spee d (VRS), a form of covert speech used to maintain verbal information in working memory, and another verbal processing speed measure, perceptual encoding speed, are related to 3 domains of executive function (EF) at risk in cochlear implant (CI) users: verbal working memory, fluency-speed, and inhibition-concentration. Method EF, speech perception, and language outcome measures were obtained from 55 prelingually deaf, long-term CI users and matched controls with normal hearing (NH controls). Correlational analyses were used to assess relations between VRS (articulation rate), perceptual encoding speed (digit and color naming), and the outcomes in each sample. Results CI users displayed slower verbal processing speeds than NH controls. Verbal rehearsal speed was related to 2 EF domains in the NH sample but was unrelated to EF outcomes in CI users. Perceptual encoding speed was related to all EF domains in both groups. Conclusions Verbal rehearsal speed may be less influential for EF quality in CI users than for NH controls, whereas rapid automatized labeling skills and EF are closely related in both groups. CI users may develop processing strategies in EF tasks that differ from the covert speech strategies routinely employed by NH individuals. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.6170501

It is well-accepted that younger children perform more poorly than older children and adults on tests of working memory, the current-task information kept in an active state for short-term recall. It is clear that the development of working memory ability is an important component of cognitive development across many tasks (e.g., Andrews & Halford, 2002; Cowan et al., 2005, 2006; Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge, & Wearing, 2004; Hitch, Towse, & Hutton, 2001; Johnson, Im-Bolter, & Pascual-Leone, 2003). What has been more controversial for many years is the reason behind the age differences in working memory performance. One simple hypothesis, the one advocated here, is that some brain system operates by retaining a limited number of items in an active form, and that this brain system holds fewer items in young children than in older participants (e.g., Burtis, 1982; Case, 1995; Cowan, 2001; Pascual-Leone & Smith, 1969). The notion that there is a working memory faculty limited to no more than a few items is supported by considerable recent research in adults (Awh, Barton, & Vogel, 2007; Cowan & Rouder, 2009; Rouder et al., 2008; Zhang & Luck, 2008; for an opposing view see Bays & Husain, 2008, 2009). The challenge for advocates of a capacity-growth hypothesis, however, is that it is not logically necessary; other possibilities exist (e.g., Barrouillet, Gavens, Vergauwe, Gaillard, & Camos, 2009; Case, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982; Dempster, 1991; Hulme & Tordoff, 1989). The older participants may excel at focusing on more task-relevant information, in which case the holding system in the brain may be more cluttered by information irrelevant to the task at hand in younger children. Also, older participants may be better able to encode the stimuli in a manner that allows the information to be retrieved. In particular, they may form verbal labels for the stimuli that allow these stimuli to be retained using multiple brain systems, adding redundancy to the representation and making recall more reliable. In fact, verbal rehearsal is one of the main ways in which mnemonic processing improves in childhood (e.g., Cowan, Cartwright, Winterowd, & Sherk, 1987; Cowan, Saults, & Morey, 2006; Flavell, Beach, & Chinsky, 1966; Ornstein, Naus, & Liberty, 1975; Tam, Jarrold, Baddeley, & Sabatos-DeVito, 2010). The present research was designed to determine whether an age difference in working memory performance could be obtained across manipulations in factors that could affect the encoding of the stimuli. It was based on the procedure used by Cowan, Morey, AuBuchon, Zwilling, and Gilchrist (2010), illustrated in Figure 1. On each trial in that study, an array was presented for 500 ms and the task was to retain items from the array for a probe item recognition test shortly afterward. The probe either was identical to the array item in the same location or differed from that array item in color, in one of three ways shown in the figure. In the most critical condition, the one to be replicated here, the instructions said to pay attention to items in one shape and not another (e.g., circles and not triangles) throughout the session. The probe tested was in the attended shape 80% of the time, but in the other shape the remaining 20% of the time. After Gold et al. (2006), it was possible to obtain two meaningful measures from the results. First, the sum of items recalled from the attended and unattended (or less-attended) shape provided an estimate of the number of items held in working memory. Second, the difference between the number of items recalled in the attended versus unattended shape provided an estimate of the efficiency of the allocation of attention preferentially to the shape that was usually tested, and therefore more relevant than the other shape for maximum performance. Figure 1 After Cowan, Morey, AuBuchon, Zwilling, and Gilchrist (2010, Figure 2). An illustration of the array memory procedure. The present study differed from Cowan et al. in that the array items were presented one at a time, and in that a verbal response was ... Results of the previous study were clearest for small arrays, which included two circles and two triangles. Cowan et al. (2010) found that children in Grades 1-2 recalled far fewer items in total, but that they favored the relevant shape to the same degree as older children (Grades 6-7) or adults (college students). This strongly suggests that visual working memory capacity increases with age in childhood. The reason for this finding, however, is not yet clear. It could be that the effect occurs because children are not as good at entering the items from a brief, concurrent visual display into working memory. To examine whether that encoding difference can explain the age difference in capacity, the present experiment mirrored that of Cowan et al. but with the items presented one at a time, at a slow rate of 1 s per item (Figure 2). Figure 2 Comparison of the simultaneous array presentation method of Cowan, Morey, AuBuchon, Zwilling, and Gilchrist (2010) to the sequential array presentation method of the present study. If age differences in the number of items retained in working memory survive this change in procedure, though, there is still an explanation aside from basic capacity growth. It could be that this slower procedure allows time for older participants to engage in verbal encoding and rehearsal of the visual items, enhancing recall. To examine this factor, each participant carried out trials in each of three articulation conditions. In the first condition, the participant remained silent and therefore was free to adopt whatever strategy he or she wished. In a second condition, the color of each item was to be named as it was presented. This should enhance recall generally for individuals who did not spontaneously name the colors. Finally, in a third condition, the participant was to say the word “wait” after each item presented. This is essentially an articulatory suppression condition (Baddeley, 1986) in which the need to say a word irrelevant to the memory task interrupts more task-relevant verbal processing, such as labeling and covert rehearsal. If the working memory advantage of older participants in this procedure accrues only because they use verbal processing better than younger children, then the age difference might be substantially diminished when naming of the color is required (because item colors are then verbally labeled in all groups, instead of just the older participants) and it should be diminished also when an irrelevant word is required (because it disrupts verbal processing that may otherwise be an advantage for older participants). This last condition, presented after the participants are well-practiced in the task, provides the best indication of each age group's basic visual working memory capacity without the assistance of verbal strategies.

Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory performance increases with age in childhood, but it is not clear why. One main hypothesis has been that younger children are less efficient in their attention; specifically, they are less able to exclude irrelevant items from working memory to make room for relevant items. We examined this hypothesis by measuring visual working memory capacity under a continuum of five attention conditions. A recognition advantage was found for items to be attended as opposed to ignored. The size of this attention-related effect was adult-like in young children with small arrays, suggesting that their attention processes are efficient even though their working memory capacity is smaller than that of older children and adults. With a larger working memory load, this efficiency in young children was compromised. The efficiency of attention cannot be the sole explanation for the capacity difference.

Individual differences in verbal working memory underlie the substantial variation routinely observed in speech and language outcomes of deaf children with cochlear implants. In this chapter we describe the nature of verbal working memory and its component processes: encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. We then present evidence suggesting that the verbal working memory delays and disturbances found recently in many young CI users are not idiopathic or anomalous but are consistent with a large body of earlier research in verbal working memory development in normal-hearing, typically-developing children. Specifically, pre-lingually deaf CI users appear to be at risk for slow and inefficient phonological recoding and verbal rehearsal processes because of the early atypical auditory and language environments in which their verbal working memory systems develop.

The working memory system maintains the limited information that can be kept in mind at one time. These memories are distinct from the vast amount of information stored in long-term memory. Here we give a brief summary of findings over the past half-century in the areas of working memory that we see as particularly important for understanding its nature. We discuss several current controversies, including whether there are different systems or brain modules for different kinds of working memory, why we lose items from working memory, and how individuals and age groups differ. We try to describe what is and is not known. Last, a discussion of findings from neuroimaging helps to constrain working memory theory. Copyright © 2010 John WileySons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Objective: To determine whether early-implanted, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users display delays in verbal short-term and working memory capacity when processes related to audibility and speech production are eliminated. Design: Twenty-three long-term CI users and 23 normal-hearing controls each completed forward and backward digit span tasks under testing conditions that differed in presentation modality (auditory or visual) and response output (spoken recall or manual pointing). Results: Normal-hearing controls reproduced more lists of digits than the CI users, even when the test items were presented visually and the responses were made manually via touchscreen response. Conclusions: Short-term and working memory delays observed in CI users are not due to greater demands from peripheral sensory processes such as audibility or from overt speech-motor planning and response output organization. Instead, CI users are less efficient at encoding and maintaining phonological representations in verbal short-term memory using phonological and linguistic strategies during memory tasks.

Purpose This study investigated long-term speech intelligibility outcomes in 63 prelingually deaf children, adolescents, and young adults who received cochlear implants (CIs) before age 7 ( M = 2;11 [years;months], range = 0;8–6;3) and used their implants for at least 7 years ( M = 12;1, range = 7;0–22;5). Method Speech intelligibility was assessed using playback methods with naïve, normal-hearing listeners. Results Mean intelligibility scores were lower than scores obtained from an age- and nonverbal IQ–matched, normal-hearing control sample, although the majority of CI users scored within the range of the control sample. Our sample allowed us to investigate the contribution of several demographic and cognitive factors to speech intelligibility. CI users who used their implant for longer periods of time exhibited poorer speech intelligibility scores. Crucially, results from a hierarchical regression model suggested that this difference was due to more conservative candidacy criteria in CI users with more years of use. No other demographic variables accounted for significant variance in speech intelligibility scores beyond age of implantation and amount of spoken language experience (assessed by communication mode and family income measures). Conclusion Many factors that have been found to contribute to individual differences in language outcomes in normal-hearing children also contribute to long-term CI users' ability to produce intelligible speech.

Why does visual working memory performance increase with age in childhood? One recent study (Cowan et al., 2010b) ruled out the possibility that the basic cause is a tendency in young children to clutter working memory with less-relevant items (within a concurrent array, colored items presented in one of two shapes). The age differences in memory performance, however, theoretically could result from inadequate encoding of the briefly presented array items by younger children. We replicated the key part of the procedure in children 6-8 and 11-13 years old and college students (total N = 90), but with a much slower, sequential presentation of the items to ensure adequate encoding. We also required verbal responses during encoding to encourage or discourage labeling of item information. Although verbal labeling affected performance, age differences persisted across labeling conditions, further supporting the existence of a basic growth in capacity.

The nature of the childhood development of immediate recall has been difficult to determine. There could be a developmental increase in either the number of chunks held in working memory or the use of grouping to make the most of a constant capacity. In 3 experiments with children in the early elementary school years and adults, we show that improvements in the immediate recall of word and picture lists come partly from increases in the number of chunks of items retained in memory. This finding was based on a distinction between access to a studied group of items (i.e., recall of at least 1 item from the group) and completion of the accessed group (i.e., the proportion of the items recalled from the group). Access rates increased with age, even with statistical controls for completion rates, implicating development of capacity in chunks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory performance increases with age in childhood, but it is not clear why. One main hypothesis has been that younger children are less efficient in their attention; specifically, they are less able to exclude irrelevant items from working memory to make room for relevant items. We examined this hypothesis by measuring visual working memory capacity under a continuum of five attention conditions. A recognition advantage was found for items to be attended as opposed to ignored. The size of this attention-related effect was adult-like in young children with small arrays, suggesting that their attention processes are efficient even though their working memory capacity is smaller than that of older children and adults. With a larger working memory load, this efficiency in young children was compromised. The efficiency of attention cannot be the sole explanation for the capacity difference.

A key question in cognitive psychology is whether information in short-term memory is lost as a function of time. Lewandowsky, Duncan, and Brown (2004) argued against that memory loss because forgetting in serial recall occurred to the same extent across serial positions regardless of the rate of recall. However, we believe Lewandowsky et al. (2004) only prevented one of two types of rehearsal; they did not prevent nonarticulatory rehearsal via attention. To prevent articulatory and nonarticulatory rehearsal without introducing interference, we presented unevenly timed stimuli for serial recall and, on some trials, required that the timing of stimuli be reproduced in the response. In those trials only, evidence of memory loss over time emerged. Further research is needed to identify whether this memory loss is decay or lost distinctiveness.