Abstract
The present study investigated the development of visuospatial working memory (VSWM) capacity and the efficiency of filtering in VSWM in adolescence. To this end, a group of IQ-matched adults and adolescents performed a VSWM change detection task with manipulations of WM-load and distraction, while performance and electrophysiological contralateral delay activity (CDA) were measured. The CDA is a lateralized ERP marker of the number of targets and distracters that are selectively encoded/maintained in WM from one hemifield of the memory display. Significantly lower VSWM-capacity (Cowan's K) was found in adolescents than adults, and adolescents' WM performance (in terms of accuracy and speed) also suffered more from the presence of distracters. Distracter-related CDA responses were partly indicative of higher distracter encoding/maintenance in WM in adolescents and were positively correlated with performance measures of distracter interference. This correlation suggests that the higher interference of distracters on WM performance in adolescents was caused by an inability to block distracters from processing and maintenance in WM. The lower visuospatial WM-capacity (K) in adolescents in the high load (3 items) condition was accompanied by a trend (p<.10) towards higher CDA amplitudes in adolescents than adults, whereas CDA amplitudes in the low load (1 item) condition were comparable between adolescents and adults. These findings point to immaturity of frontal-parietal WM-attention networks that support visuospatial WM processing in adolescence.
Highlights
Working memory (WM), our system for storage and maintenance of information for short periods of time, plays a crucial role in the development of cognitive abilities
The present study shows that adolescents have immature capacity in a relatively simple visuospatial working memory (VSWM) change detection task in which they have to store a maximum of three items
It has to be noted that, in both adolescents and adults T1D2 amplitude overlapped with T3D0 amplitude whereas in case of more efficient filtering in adults one might expect that, besides the smaller T1D0-T1D2 difference that we found, adults would show higher T3D0 than T1D2 contralateral delay activity (CDA) amplitude, as has been reported in adults with high WM-capacity [8]
Summary
Working memory (WM), our system for storage and maintenance of information for short periods of time, plays a crucial role in the development of cognitive abilities. Recent work has shown that the capacity of WM does depend on how many items can be stored in short-term memory, and on the efficiency with which items are stored [8,9,10]. The latter means that only items that are relevant to current task goals should be selected for access to and maintenance in WM. Recent studies have shown that low WM-capacity can be caused by inefficient filtering of information that enters WM for maintenance [8,11,12,13,14,15]
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