Estévez, A. 1 , Esteban, L. 1 , Melero, R. 1 , Vivas, A. 2 , López-Crespo, G. 3 & Easton, A. 4
1 Universidad de Almería, Almería, Spain
2 City Liberal Studies (Affiliated Institution of the Univesity of Sheffield), Thessaloniki, Greece
3 Universidad de Zaragoza, Teruel, Spain
4 Durham University, Durham, UK
Background: It has been demonstrated that the differential outcomes procedure (DOP) facilitates both conditional discrimination learning and delayed face recognition in humans. In the present study, we extend this procedure to five and seven-year-old children who were asked to remember spatial locations. Method: Two computerized spatial working memory tasks were used. In the differential outcomes condition each location was paired with its own outcome. In the non-differential condition outcomes were randomly arranged. Results: Five-year-old children showed a significantly better performance when differential outcomes were arranged. By contrast, the overall performance of children aged seven was similar in both conditions, differential and non-differential, suggesting that the task used was very easy for them to perform. Conclusions: These results showed, to our knowledge for the first time, that the DOP can enhance spatial recognition memory performance in children. This finding, along with those of Hochhalter, Sweeney, Bakke, Holub, and Overmier (2000) and López-Crespo, Plaza, Fuentes, and Estévez (2009) suggests that this procedure can be a technique to improve memory performance in children and in people with memory impairments. This research was supported by grants CSD2008-00048 and PSI2009-09261 from Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.