Rights statement: The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-00916-6
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Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Charting the trajectory of forgetting
T2 - Insights from a working memory period paradigm
AU - Towse, John Nicholas
AU - Hitch, Graham
AU - Horton, Neil James
N1 - The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-00916-6
PY - 2019/8/15
Y1 - 2019/8/15
N2 - Working memory capacity is commonly measured in terms of its item span, and much less often in terms of its time span, or “period.” The former measures how many items can be stored in working memory when carrying out episodes of concurrent processing. The latter complements this by determining the duration of processing episodes that can be tolerated while successfully storing a fixed number of items. We investigated the generality of previous evidence that working memory period varies with the distribution of longer and shorter processing episodes within a trial, and that notwithstanding such differences, a global measure of period is a reliable predictor of children’s educational attainment. We describe data from 184 children, between 7 and 11 years of age, who completed variants of an operation period task with different distributions of processing episodes together with measures of scholastic attainment. Individual differences in period scores were consistent over two test sessions, and were predictive of reading and number skills. We replicated previous effects of the order of longer and shorter processing episodes, but found that they did not generalize fully to other manipulations of order. The results point to the contribution of subtle within-trial sequence configurations for working memory. We make the case for a broader view of what constrains working memory than exists in current models.
AB - Working memory capacity is commonly measured in terms of its item span, and much less often in terms of its time span, or “period.” The former measures how many items can be stored in working memory when carrying out episodes of concurrent processing. The latter complements this by determining the duration of processing episodes that can be tolerated while successfully storing a fixed number of items. We investigated the generality of previous evidence that working memory period varies with the distribution of longer and shorter processing episodes within a trial, and that notwithstanding such differences, a global measure of period is a reliable predictor of children’s educational attainment. We describe data from 184 children, between 7 and 11 years of age, who completed variants of an operation period task with different distributions of processing episodes together with measures of scholastic attainment. Individual differences in period scores were consistent over two test sessions, and were predictive of reading and number skills. We replicated previous effects of the order of longer and shorter processing episodes, but found that they did not generalize fully to other manipulations of order. The results point to the contribution of subtle within-trial sequence configurations for working memory. We make the case for a broader view of what constrains working memory than exists in current models.
KW - working memory
KW - forgetting rate
KW - individual-differences
KW - operation period
U2 - 10.3758/s13421-019-00916-6
DO - 10.3758/s13421-019-00916-6
M3 - Journal article
VL - 47
SP - 1063
EP - 1075
JO - Memory and Cognition
JF - Memory and Cognition
SN - 0090-502X
IS - 6
ER -