The Development of Working Memory: Exploring the Complementarity of Two Models

Author version made available in accordance with the publisher's policy for non-mandated open access submission. Under Elsevier's copyright, non-mandated authors are permitted to make work available in an institutional repository.The aim of the paper was to further explore the complementarity of the working memory models postulated by Pascual-Leone and Baddeley. Five-, six-, eight- and nine-year-old children were assessed on two working memory tasks, which have frequently been used within the respective streams of research: the Mr. Peanut task and the Corsi blocks task. Results indicated a developmental increase in spatial short-term memory for both tasks. Concurrent spatial suppression reduced performance on the two tasks in all four age groups. By contrast, articulatory suppression only interfered with recall on the Mr. Peanut task, and only in the older children. The two models were shown to make their own specific contribution to the interpretation of the data, attesting to their complementarity. Pascual-Leone’s theory offered a clear explanation of the results concerning the central aspects of working memory, i.e. the stepwise age-related increase in performance, whereas Baddeley’s model provided a convincing account of the findings regarding the peripheral phonological and visuo-spatial components, i.e. the effects of articulatory and spatial suppression. Key Words: short-term memory; spatial memory; information processing capacity; memory development; working memory models; rehearsal strategies; cognitive development

Number comparison under executive dual-task

Several studies have shown that random interval generation (RIG) interferes with simple mental arithmetic, suggesting that executive processes are involved in simple arithmetic. However, an alternative interpretation would be that RIG calls on quantitative instead of executive processes. The present study explored this possibility. We investigated a typical quantitative effect, the distance effect, under single and dual task. We reasoned that if it is true that both number comparison and RIG are based on quantitative processes, then the distance effect should disappear or at least decrease under dual task. Results showed that the distance effect did not decrease when performed simultaneously with RIG, ruling out this alternative interpretation. Moreover, our data provide additional evidence for the robustness of the distance effect in numerical cognition