Variability in 5- and 8-year-olds' memory for duration: an interfering task in temporal bisection.
The purpose of this experiment was to investigate 5- and 8-year-olds' long-term memory for stimulus duration in a bisection task. Children were trained to discriminate between a short and a long standard duration presented as visual stimulus for 2 and 8 s, respectively. They had then to decide whether an intermediate stimulus duration was more similar to the short or to the long standard in two identical testing phases separated by an interfering task lasting for 15 min (immediate test vs. deferred test). The results showed that the 5- and the 8-year-olds produced orderly psychophysical functions. However, the 8-year-olds produced psychophysical functions, which increased more abruptly with the increasing stimulus duration. Nevertheless, whatever the age of children tested, the psychophysical function curves were flatter in the deferred test than in the immediate test, and more particularly in the 5-year-olds. Furthermore, the 5-year-olds produced fewer 'long' responses in the deferred than in the immediate test. Modeling of the data suggests that the variability of the representation of the standard in long-term memory was higher in the 5- than in the 8-year-olds and that the interfering task increased this memory variability.
Rattat
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Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale de la Cognition, CNRS (UPRESA 6024), Blaise Pascal University, 34 Avenue Carnot, 63037, Clermont-Ferrand Cedex, France
Droit-Volet
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