How does working memory develop in primary school children?
Children show rapid working memory improvements between ages 7 and 9 that slow down as they get older, with girls improving faster than boys.
Source
Developmental Trajectories in Primary Schoolchildren Using n-Back Task
What they did
Researchers tracked 2897 Spanish primary school students over a 1-year period. The children completed a computerized memory task 4 times, once every 3 months, to assess how working memory develops. Teachers also completed ratings of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms for each child.
What they found
Working memory performance increased rapidly in children aged 7 to 9, but this growth rate slowed down as children approached age 11. Girls improved faster than boys over the 1-year period, while children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms had lower starting scores and lacked the typical age-related response speed improvements.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study cannot rule out all practice effects, meaning some observed improvement could be due to completing the test 4 times rather than true developmental growth. Additionally, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms were reported only by teachers, which leaves out how children behave at home. Finally, 55% of mothers had a university degree, meaning the sample is highly educated and may not represent the general public.
Key terms
- Working Memory (WM)
- A cognitive system responsible for temporarily holding and manipulating information needed for complex tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension.
- n-Back Task
- A continuous computerized recognition test where participants determine if the current stimulus matches one presented 'n' steps back in the sequence.
- d Prime (d')
- A statistic from signal detection theory that measures an individual's sensitivity to distinguishing actual signals from background noise.
- Hit Reaction Time (HRT)
- The average amount of time a participant takes to correctly respond to target stimuli during a cognitive test.
- Ceiling Effect
- A measurement limitation where a test is too easy, causing most participants to achieve maximum scores and obscuring individual differences.
- Multilevel Mixed-Effects Linear Regression
- A statistical model used to analyze data that have a hierarchical structure, such as multiple test scores nested within individual children.
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Quiz yourself
What is a major criticism of repeatedly administering the same cognitive test within short periods of time?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use the n-back task instead of other working memory tests?
The computerized n-back task is highly objective, simple for children to complete because it requires simple button presses instead of active recall, and allows researchers to gather a large amount of precise cognitive data in a short period of time.
Did the children improve simply because they practiced the test multiple times?
While some practice effects likely occurred, the researchers compared children of the same age who had and had not taken the test before and found very weak practice effects, suggesting the improvements mostly reflected true age-related cognitive growth.
How did children with ADHD symptoms perform compared to their peers?
Children with ADHD symptoms started with lower overall working memory scores and did not show the same age-related improvements in response speed or verbal task accuracy as typically developing children.
Why did the oldest primary school children show less working memory improvement than the younger ones?
Working memory undergoes a period of rapid growth in early childhood (especially between ages 7 and 9), which begins to slow down and stabilize as children reach late childhood and early adolescence.
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