Verbal and Spatial Working Memory in Children: age effects in intra and intermodal interference

LORENA CANET JURIC; MARÍA MARTHA RICHARD'S; MARÍA LAURA ANDRÉS; MARÍA SILVINA DEMAGISTRI; GRAZIELLA MASCARELLO; BURIN, D. I.

Brasilia

Congreso; XXXIV Congreso Interamericano de Psicología; 2013

Sociedad Interamericana de Psicología

Working memory (WM) is a complex system of limited capacity that allows temporary access to a select set of representations to achieve ongoing cognitive processes. It is well known that WM experience a steady increase from 4 to 15 years. During this period, there is a lineal increase that involves the processing and storage capacity of verbal and visuospatial materials. Most research has focused on memory for words or material that can be verbally encoded and there has been relatively little exploration of memory span for visuospatial information. In adittion, has been proposed that the ability to inhibit or suppress irrelevant information is an important mechanism that underlies many of changes observed during childhood, even WM changes. Also, there is evidence that this ability to inhibit irrelevant information changes depending of kind of interference, interor intra-domain. However this, little is known about the role of each domain-specific interference in childhood and the function of this mechanism in the development of WM. Considering the lack of visuospatial working memory studies and the role of intraand inter-modal interference in the development of WM, the goal of this work is explore the development of WM in verbal and visuoespatial domain regarding specific and non-specific interference effects. For this purpose a dual interference paradigm verbal and visuoespatial of WM was selected. The dual tasks require the children to perform two simultaneously tasks: one primary and one secondary. The primary task involves maintaining a stimulus in the short-term memory. The secondary task aims to disrupt any strategy that would enable the maintenance of primary task information. The idea behind the dual paradigm is that there is a limited set of resources working in memory task that must share primary and secondary tasks, causing decrements in performance. Thereby memory spans of verbal and spatial items were obtained from 3 groups (9, 10, and 11-year-olds) of 100 children under 6 different conditions: two primary memory tasks (1 verbal modality, 1 spatial modality) wereadministered in isolation and in conjunction with 2 versions of a secondary task. The primary tasks required recalling a series of visually presented digits and recalling the locations of Xs in a series of visually presented grids. The secondary tasks required report the color of the stimuli as they were presented using either a verbal or a spatial response. The analysis of means group revealed in all groups less development of spatial memory and higher intermodal interference, manifesting only significant difference between ages 9 and 11 years in simple spans verbal memory and spatial memory but showing only significant differences in intramodal spatial interference tasks. These findings suggest that at least some inhibitory functions which are responsible for suppressing interference intramodal do not reach adult levels of efficiency until approximately age 11.