Abstract
Long-term memory (LTM) associations appear as important to cognition as single memory contents. Previous studies on updating development have focused on cognitive processes and components, whereas our investigation examines how contents, associated with different LTM strength (strong or weak), might be differentially updated at different ages. To this end, we manipulated association strength of information given at encoding, in order to focus on updating pre-existing LTM associations; specifically, associations for letters. In particular, we controlled for letters usage frequency at the sub-lexical level. We used a task where we dissociated inhibition online (i.e., RTs for updating and controlling inhibition from the same set) and offline (i.e., RTs for controlling inhibition from previously updated sets). Mixed-effect analyses were conducted and showed a substantial behavioural cost when strong associations had to be dismantled online (i.e., longer RTs), compared to weak ones; here, in primary school age children. Interestingly, this effect was independent of age; in fact, children from 7–8 to 9–10 years were comparably sensitive to the strength of LTM associations in updating. However, older children were more effective in offline inhibitory control.
Highlights
Working memory (WM) is a capacity limited system, able to maintain actively sets of representations useful in complex cognitive skills such as reading [1, 2] or text comprehension [3, 4]
We aimed to study how updating of long-term memory (LTM) bindings develops in primary school children
Given that Long-term memory (LTM) inter-item associations seem as important as single contents [14], we aimed to investigate whether associated information modulates updating performance in development
Summary
Working memory (WM) is a capacity limited system, able to maintain actively sets of representations useful in complex cognitive skills such as reading [1, 2] or text comprehension [3, 4]. WM performance improves substantially over childhood with linear increases [5, 6] These developmental improvements may be driven by increases in storage capacity [7], rehearsal strategies [8], or updating processes [9]. Updating tasks are based on binding and unbinding processes between memory contents (e.g., [11]). The role of associative contextual bindings in episodic memory retrieval was supported [13]. Overall, it appears that the monitoring of associative bindings between contents is a specific challenge for the updating process (see [14, 15])
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