Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Mar;25(2):e13164.
doi: 10.1111/desc.13164. Epub 2021 Aug 10.

Children's long-term retention is directly constrained by their working memory capacity limitations

Alicia Forsberg  1 , Dominic Guitard  2 , Eryn J Adams  1 , Duangporn Pattanakul  1 , Nelson Cowan  1
Affiliations

Children's long-term retention is directly constrained by their working memory capacity limitations

Alicia Forsberg et al. Dev Sci. 2022 Mar.

Abstract

We explored the causal role of individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity in long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Our sample of 160 participants included 120 children (6-13-years old) and 40 young adults (18-24 years). Participants performed a WM task with images of unique everyday items, presented at varying set sizes. Subsequently, we tested participants' LTM for items from the WM task. Using these measures, we estimated the ratio at which items successfully held in WM were recognized in LTM. While WM and LTM generally improved with age, the ability to transfer information from WM to LTM appeared consistent between age groups. Moreover, individual differences in WM capacity appeared to predict LTM encoding. Overall, these results suggested that LTM performance was constrained by experimental, individual, and age-related WM limitations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this WM-to-LTM bottleneck.

Keywords: child development; information transfer; long-term memory; working memory.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Outline of some typical trials. Panel A, Working Memory (WM) Task trial. Panel B, two trials in the Long-Term Memory (LTM) Task. The memory array set size in the WM task varied between 2, 4, or 6 items, and the presentation time was adjusted to be 250 ms per item. During the WM response phase, participants indicated whether they had seen the probe item in the Memory Array or not, and also selected their level of confidence, by clicking on the relevant option. In the LTM task, participants indicated whether they had previously seen the probe items in the WM task. This figure is presented in greyscale. In the real experiment, the response scale was green for the three response options indicating having seen the object, and red for the options indicating not having seen the objects.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Memory accuracy by WM set size. Panel A, p(WM) (i.e., the estimated probability that items were held in WM); Panel B, p(LTM) (i.e., the estimated probability that items were held in LTM); Panel C, the p(LTM)/p(WM) ratio. Triangles and solid lines and show the college students data, diamonds and long-dashes the 5-7th graders, squares and mixed dashes 3rd – 4th graders, and circles and dotted lines the 1st – 2nd graders. Lighter lines show individual subjects estimates. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Correlations between age-adjusted z-scores of the average number of items in LTM and working memory capacity, in participants of the four age groups.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Adam KC, Vogel EK, & Awh E (2017). Clear evidence for item limits in visual working memory. Cognitive Psychology, 97, 79–97. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Allwood CM, Innes-Ker ÅH, Holmgren J, & Fredin G (2009). "Children's and adults' realism in their event-recall confidence in responses to free recall and focused questions": Corrigendum. Psychology, Crime & Law, 15(1), 91.
    1. Atkinson RC, & Shiffrin RM (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 2(4), 89–195.
    1. Bartsch LM, Loaiza VM, & Oberauer K (2019). Does limited working memory capacity underlie age differences in associative long-term memory? Psychology and Aging, 34(2), 268. - PubMed
    1. Bartsch LM, Singmann H, & Oberauer K (2018). The effects of refreshing and elaboration on working memory performance, and their contributions to long-term memory formation. Memory & Cognition, 46(5), 796–808.” - PubMed

Publication types