Oftinger, A. & Camos, V.
Departement of psychology. University of Fribourg. Fribourg, Switzerland.
Past research in adults shows two mechanisms of maintenance of verbal information in working memory, articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing. Rehearsal in Baddeley’s model is already in use at 7 years of age (Tam, Jarrold, Baddeley, & Sabatos-DeVito, 2010). At that age, children also use attentional refreshing mechanism described in time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) model (Barrouillet, & Camos, 2010). The present study evaluated the interplay between these two mechanisms and its changes from 7 to 9.
In a complex span task, children have to maintain letters, while they performed a concurrent task. The opportunity for attentional refreshing was manipulated by varying the attentional demand of the concurrent task. This task was performed either silently or aloud, the latter involving an additional articulatory suppression. As expected, recall performance increased with age. The articulatory suppression had a detrimental effect on recall, but it did not varied across the age groups. Finally, increasing the attention demand of the concurrent task reduced recall, but this effect did not interact with age, or with articulatory suppression. To conclude, the efficiency of the articulatory rehearsal or the attentional refreshing did not improve from 7 to 9, contrary to previous results.