ABSTRACT

The developmental progression in short-term memory (STM) is well-documented throughout childhood. Most research has emphasized the verbal memory domain, and less is known about the visual-spatial systematic improvement. We conducted a cross-sectional study assessing 4 age groups of preschool and school-aged children (N = 223): Age Group 1 (mean age = 50 months), Age Group 2 (mean age = 71 months), Age Group 3 (mean age = 87 months) and Age Group 4 (mean age = 96 months). STM performances across all age groups, as well as preschoolers' metamemory judgments (concerning their visual-spatial memory strategies) were investigated. Regarding response accuracy, we found that span performance increased across the four age groups on all span tasks. School aged children made a better use of verbal recoding of familiar visual stimuli (colors and objects); only on these visual, but verbally-recodable tasks did we also find a gender effect in preschool children, girls outperforming boys. The total number of errors on verbal STM decreased with age. Finally, regarding metamemory, most preschoolers were able to make judgments regarding the strategies they used to better encode the memoranda (i.e. spontaneous rehearsal and verbal coding of visual stimuli).

KEYWORDS: short-term memory, simple span, children, error analysis, metamemory.

PAGES: 71-101