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The current study investigated the effects of metacognitive and executive function (EF) training on childhood EF (inhibition, working memory [WM], cognitive flexibility, and proactive/reactive control) and academic skills (reading, reasoning, and math) among children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Children (N = 134, M[subscript age] = 8.70 years) were assigned randomly to the three training groups: (a) metacognitive training of basic EF processes (meta-EF), (b) training of basic EF processes (basic-EF), and (c) active controls (active control). They underwent 16 training sessions over the course of 2 months. No effects of EF and/or metacognitive training were found for academic outcomes. However, both meta-EF and basic-EF groups demonstrated greater gains than the active control group on proactive control engagement and WM, suggesting that EF training promotes a shift to more mature ways of engaging EF. Our findings suggest minimal near- and far-transfer effects of metacognitive training but highlight that proactive engagement of EF can be promoted through EF training in children.

Previous work with complex memory span tasks, in which simple choice decisions are imposed between presentations of to-be-remembered items, shows that these secondary tasks reduce memory span. It is less clear how reconfiguring and maintaining various amounts of information affects decision speeds. We introduced preliminary "lead-in" decisions and postencoding "lead-out" decisions to isolate potential influences of reconfiguration and maintenance on decision speeds. Compared with preliminary lead-in choice responses, the response associated with the first memory item slowed substantially. As the list accumulated, decision responses slowed even more. After presentation of the list was complete, decision responses sped rapidly: within a few seconds, decisions were at least as fast as when remembering a single item. These patterns appeared consistently regardless of differences in list length (4, 5, 6, or 7 to-be-remembered items) and response mode (spoken, selection via mouse). This pattern of findings is inconsistent with the idea that merely holding information in mind conflicts with attention-demanding decision tasks. Instead, it is likely that reconfiguring memory items for responding is the source of conflict between memory and processing in complex span tasks.

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, 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.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository.

Though verbal rehearsal is a frequently endorsed strategy for remembering short lists among adults, there is ambiguity around when children deploy it, and what circumstantial factors encourage them to rehearse. We recoded data from a recent multilab replication of a serial picture memory task in which children were observed for evidence of task-related speech or lip movements to extract finer-grained detail about how children spoke during the task. With these data, we aimed to better understand the manner in which children rehearse and the task scenarios which elicit overt rehearsal. Children in several countries from 5 to 10 years old were tasked with remembering 2–5 nameable pictures in serial order across a 15-second delay. Coders categorized children’s speech or lip movements as reflecting fixed rehearsal of the last-presented item only, cumulative rehearsal of all the items presented so far, or some attempt at cumulative rehearsal. We found that most children, regardless of age, did not overtly rehearse at all during presentation of the objects or during the delay period. However, children who sometimes overtly rehearsed recalled longer lists of items than children who did not. Though rare, cumulative rehearsal was most frequently observed for list lengths close to the participant’s demonstrated maximum recall length. Critically, on the trials where overt rehearsal was observed, recall improved. This evidence supports previous suggestions that rehearsal strategy, and possibly also its effectiveness, changes with task difficulty, and raises further questions about how verbal rehearsal affects serial recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of strategic verbal rehearsal at around 7 years of age is widely considered a major milestone in descriptions of the development of short-term memory across childhood. Likewise, rehearsal is believed by many to be a crucial factor in explaining why memory improves with age. This apparent qualitative shift in mnemonic processes has also been characterized as a shift from passive visual to more active verbal mnemonic strategy use, but no investigation of the development of overt spatial rehearsal has informed this explanation. We measured serial spatial order reconstruction in adults and groups of children 5-7 years old and 8-11 years old, while recording their eye movements. Children, particularly the youngest children, overtly fixated late-list spatial positions longer than adults, suggesting that younger children are less likely to engage in covert rehearsal during stimulus presentation than older children and adults. However, during retention the youngest children overtly fixated more of the to-be-remembered sequences than any other group, which is inconsistent with the idea that children do nothing to try to remember. Altogether, these data are inconsistent with the notion that children under 7 do not engage in any attempts to remember. They are most consistent with proposals that children's style of remembering shifts around age 7 from reactive cue-driven methods to proactive, covert methods, which may include cumulative rehearsal.

Among models of working memory, there is not yet a consensus about how to describe functions specific to storing verbal or visual-spatial memories. We presented aural-verbal and visual-spatial lists simultaneously and sometimes cued one type of information after presentation, comparing accuracy in conditions with and without informative retro-cues. This design isolates interference due specifically to maintenance, which appears most clearly in the uncued trials, from interference due to encoding, which occurs in all dual-task trials. When recall accuracy was comparable between tasks, we found that spatial memory was worse in uncued than in retro-cued trials, whereas verbal memory was not. Our findings bolster proposals that maintenance of spatial serial order, like maintenance of visual materials more broadly, relies on general rather than specialized resources, while maintenance of verbal sequences may rely on domain-specific resources. We argue that this asymmetry should be explicitly incorporated into models of working memory.

It is known that visual working memory capacity is limited, but the nature of this limit remains a subject of controversy. Increasingly, two factors are thought to limit visual memory: an object-based limit associated with so-called "slots" models, and an information-based limit associated with resource models. Recently, Barton, Ester, and Awh (2009) introduced a measure of mnemonic resolution, which they dubbed "c". We show here that c is critically flawed, and cannot be interpreted as a measure of resolution. We recommend strongly against its use and interpretation, and suggest alternatives approaches for researchers who want to explore mnemonic resolution. (Contains 2 figures and 2 footnotes.)

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.

Verbal-to-spatial associations in working memory may index a core capacity for abstract information limited in the amount concurrently retained. However, what look like associative, abstract representations could instead reflect verbal and spatial codes held separately and then used in parallel. We investigated this issue in two experiments on memory for associations between names and spatial locations, with or without a 1-to-1 correspondence between the two. Participants (children 9-10 and 12-13 years old and college students) saw series of names presented at spatial locations occupied by house icons and indicated the location at which a probe name had appeared. Only adults benefited from 1-to-1 correspondence between names and locations, and this benefit was eliminated by articulatory suppression. We maintain that the 1-to-1 benefit stems from verbal and spatial codes used in parallel. Without rehearsal, performance appears to index working memory for abstract, cross-modal information. Correlations with other tasks suggest that it is an excellent measure of working memory capacity.

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel, 1997) combined with various verbal memory load conditions. Interference between tasks occurred if there was explicit retrieval of the verbal load during maintenance of a visual array. The effect was localized in the maintenance period of the visual task and was not the result of articulation per se. Interference also occurred when especially large silent verbal and visual loads were held concurrently. These results suggest central storage along with code-specific passive storage.

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2006.04.002 Byline: Nelson Cowan, J. Scott Saults, Candice C. Morey Keywords: Working memory; Verbal memory; Spatial memory; Associations; Binding; Memory development Abstract: Verbal-to-spatial associations in working memory may index a core capacity for abstract information limited in the amount concurrently retained. However, what look like associative, abstract representations could instead reflect verbal and spatial codes held separately and then used in parallel. We investigated this issue in two experiments on memory for associations between names and spatial locations, with or without a 1-to-1 correspondence between the two. Participants (children 9-10 and 12-13 years old and college students) saw series of names presented at spatial locations occupied by house icons and indicated the location at which a probe name had appeared. Only adults benefited from 1-to-1 correspondence between names and locations, and this benefit was eliminated by articulatory suppression. We maintain that the 1-to-1 benefit stems from verbal and spatial codes used in parallel. Without rehearsal, performance appears to index working memory for abstract, cross-modal information. Correlations with other tasks suggest that it is an excellent measure of working memory capacity. Author Affiliation: Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, 18 McAlester Hall, Columbia, MO 65211, USA Article History: Received 8 February 2006; Revised 15 April 2006 Article Note: (footnote) [star] We thank Pinky Bomb and Matt Moreno for their assistance. This research was supported by NIH Grant R01 HD-21338.

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel, 1997) combined with various verbal memory load conditions. Interference between tasks occurred if there was explicit retrieval of the verbal load during maintenance of a visual array. The effect was localized in the maintenance period of the visual task and was not the result of articulation per se. Interference also occurred when especially large silent verbal and visual loads were held concurrently. These results suggest central storage along with code-specific passive storage. Keywords: working memory, attention, dual task, cross-domain, storage