Assessing and supporting working memory in children: the role of attention and the environment

Working memory (WM) – the ability to store information over short periods
of time in support of complex cognition – is implicated in a range of cognitive
processes and developmental milestones. Given the importance of WM, it is vital
that tools exist to rapidly but effectively assess this set of abilities. In Chapter 2
the development of computerised set of measures is described that we designed
to facilitate rapid group testing in a school setting. These aims were defined by
links with the Born in Bradford longitudinal cohort study. The rest of the thesis
investigates how WM might be supported in children, a critical line of research
considering the developmental implications of WM difficulties. In Chapter 3 the
first investigation of the ability of children to prioritise serial positions within a
visual sequence is presented. Children were instructed to try especially hard to
remember either the first or third item in three-item sequences of shapes. Adults
are consistently able to do this, resulting in superior performance for the prioritised
item, at a cost to other items. Unlike adults, children did not show an ability to
prioritise a particular position, when instructed to do so. Chapter 3 also includes
a novel individual difference analysis that further clarifies the automaticity of
recency effects in visual WM. Following the absence of prioritisation effects in
Chapter 3, an alternative approach informed by embodied theories of cognition was
taken in Chapter 4. Participants were presented with a WM task where the task
environment was either structured pseudorandomly or in a task-relevant manner.
This task-relevant organisation was consistently beneficial for children with low
WM, such that they performed better than when the environment was structured.
Children’s metacognitive understanding of the experimental manipulation was also
investigated, highlighting the important of metacognitive factors to supporting
WM in children.