Mental Objects in Working Memory: Development of Basic Capacity or of Cognitive Completion?
Working memory is the small amount of information that we hold in mind and use to carry out cognitive processes such as language comprehension and production, problem solving, and decision making. In order to understand cognitive development, it would be helpful to know whether working memory increases in capacity with development and, if so, how and why. I will focus on two major stumbling blocks toward understanding working memory development, namely that (1) many potentially relevant aspects of the mind change in parallel during development, obscuring the role of any one change; and (2) one cannot use the same test procedure from infancy to adulthood, complicating comparisons across age groups. With regard to the first stumbling block, the parallel development of different aspects of the mind, we discuss research in which attempts were made to hold constant some factors (knowledge, strategies, direction of attention) to investigate whether developmental differences remain. With regard to the second stumbling block, procedural differences in tests for different age groups, I suggest ways in which the results might be reconciled across procedures. I highlight the value of pursuing research that could distinguish between two different key hypotheses that emerge: that there is a developmental increase in the number of working memory slots (or in a basic resource that holds items in working memory), and that there is a developmental increase in the amount of detail that each of these slots can hold.
['Cowan|N|N|']
D000328:Adult D000367:Age Factors D001288:Attention D002648:Child D002657:Child Development D002675:Child, Preschool D003071:Cognition D003657:Decision Making D006801:Humans D007223:Infant D008570:Memory, Short-Term D009483:Neuropsychological Tests D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual D011340:Problem Solving D012153:Retention, Psychology
Working memory Capacity Infancy Childhood Focus of attention Short-term memory