Central executive involvement in children's spatial memory.
Previous research with adults found that spatial short-term and working memory tasks impose similar demands on executive resources. We administered spatial short-term and working memory tasks to 8- and 11-year-olds in three separate experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2 an executive suppression task (random number generation) was found to impair performances on a short-term memory task (Corsi blocks), a working memory task (letter rotation), and a spatial visualisation task (paper folding). In Experiment 3 an articulatory suppression task only impaired performance on the working memory task. These results suggest that short-term and working memory performances are dependent on executive resources. The degree to which the short-term memory task was dependent on executive resources was expected to be related to the amount of experience children have had with such tasks. Yet we found no significant age-related suppression effects. This was attributed to differences in employment of cognitive strategies by the older children.
Ang
Su Yin
SY
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. suyin47@yahoo.com.sg
Lee
Kerry
K
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time; D012094:Repression, Psychology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology