Monday, May 19, 2025
5/19/2025
Cognitive effort and capacity in visual working memory development - ABSTRACT Visual Working Memory (VWM) - the limited-capacity system that maintains and manipulates information in service to an ongoing task - underlies the ability to represent, learn, and reason about the visual environment. In adults, proactive interference (PI) has been identified as a fundamental constraint on working memory capacity, if not the sole constraint. PI occurs when earlier, now irrelevant information intrudes on currently relevant information (“I think I left my keys on the table... or was that yesterday?”). In spite of the central role of PI in theoretical models of working memory, developmentally it has only been measured by a handful of studies, all of them in children over 8 years of age. In our proposed project, we will use Delayed Match Retrieval, our innovative, extensible, gaze-based VWM paradigm, to characterize and track the early development of PI resolution. In Specific Aim 1, we address fundamental questions about the sources of PI in VWM in 3-year-olds, the youngest population tested thus far, providing a broad foundation for future theoretical work. In Specific Aim 2, we will conduct a longitudinal study of children between 3 and 4 years of age, hypothesizing that development will bring increasing resistance to interference. Recent adult studies have shown that the resolution of interference is carried out by cognitive control mechanisms (related to decision-making) in the frontal cortex that are modulated by sustained attention. Here we target the preschool age because it is a period of pivotal importance in the development of both sustained attention and a range of other cognitive mechanisms (rule learning, hierarchical reasoning, planning; and language). In Specific Aim 3, we will quantify both the effect of sustained attention (leveraging our expertise in pupillometry), and general cognitive abilities, as measured by a standardized assessment (Mullen Scales of Early Learning) on the development of interference resolution. We predict that the functional relationship between sustained attention and PI resolution will increase over development as children become able to exert more effort during harder tasks with more interference, independent of the effect of general cognitive ability. This proposal thus presents a critical multi-method test of the role of sustained attention in the early development of VWM mechanisms.
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