Abstract
The results of previous studies examining the relationship between source monitoring and working memory in young children are not consistent. One of the reasons for this inconsistency is concerning the modalities of information with which working memory tasks deal. The present study investigated how young children’s verbal and visuospatial working memory capacity would be related to respective source-monitoring tasks with visually or verbally presented stimuli. Children aged four (n = 21) and five years (n = 21) participated in this study. They completed two verbal working memory tasks, namely, the backward digit span and listening span tests; and two visuospatial working memory tasks, namely, a comparative line test and a rotated figure test. In the source-monitoring task, first, an adult man and an adult woman read two different picture books to groups of children. Subsequently, they read short sentences aloud and showed pictures to the children. Each child then performed recognition tests for the sentences and the pictures, and required to decide on the appropriate source. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed the following results: The verbal working memory task (i.e., the backward digit span) was a significant factor explaining performance on the verbal source-monitoring task, whereas the visuospatial working memory task (i.e., a rotated figure test) explained the performance on the visual source-monitoring task.
Highlights
Participants completed two verbal working memory tasks, a backward digit span test, during which the participants heard a sequence of digits and had to repeat the sequence backwards, and a listening span test, in which they heard a series of sentences about animals and had to judge whether the sentences were correct, while remembering the animal that was first mentioned in the sentences
The comparative line task was so difficult for young children that it might be inappropriate for tapping the individual differences in their visuospatial working memory skills
We investigated how young children’s respective verbal and visuospatial working memory capacity would be related with their performance on source-monitoring tasks with verbal or visual stimuli
Summary
Source monitoring refers to making an attribution about the origin of a memory. For example, a child reports that a boy rode a bicycle at the park at noon last Sunday. It was difficult for the participants to monitor the sources of the words, especially those that they had heard from both the man and the woman This result suggested that complex judgement about the memory source (i.e., A, B, or A and B) would require more cognitive resources, and that young children with limited cognitive resources would find such complex source-monitoring tasks difficult. Findings revealed that the score on source monitoring was significantly related to working memory ability, suggesting that working memory ability should support young children’s monitoring of external information sources. In this study, we investigated how young preschool children’s respective verbal and visuospatial working memory capacity would be related with source-monitoring tasks with verbally or visually presented stimuli. We predicted that verbal working memory is positively correlated to the source monitoring of verbal stimuli, whereas visuospatial working memory is positively correlated to the source monitoring of visual stimuli
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