Abstract
Visual working memory (VWM) abilities of 55,753 individuals between the ages of 8 and 75 were assessed to provide the most fine-grain analysis of age-related change in VWM to date. Results showed that VWM changes throughout the lifespan, peaking at age 20. A sharp linear decline follows that is so severe that by age 55, adults possess poorer immediate visual memory than 8 and 9 year olds. These developmental changes were largely explained by changing VWM capacity coupled with small short-term visual feature binding difficulties among children and older adults.
Highlights
Visual objects are defined by a range of basic visual features such as color, shape, luminance, size, orientation, and texture
One’s ability to remember object location bindings in visual working memory (VWM)1 appears to be susceptible to the aging process
Using a common metric consistently measured across most of the lifespan on a year-by-year basis, we have shown, like many studies before ours, that VWM abilities change across the lifespan
Summary
Visual objects are defined by a range of basic visual features such as color, shape, luminance, size, orientation, and texture. One’s ability to remember object location bindings in visual working memory (VWM) appears to be susceptible to the aging process. Both children and senior citizens seem to have more difficulty maintaining memory for object location than do young adults in their twenties (e.g., Mitchell et al, 2000; Cowan et al, 2006). This inverted-U shaped trend in binding ability perhaps parallels growth and decline in several memorybased abilities in childhood and old age (e.g., Logie and Maylor, 2009; Maylor and Logie, 2010)
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