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ERIC Number: EJ1302004
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-May
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0278-7393
EISSN: N/A
Young Children Monitor the Fidelity of Visual Working Memory
Applin, Jessica B.; Kibbe, Melissa M.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, v47 n5 p808-819 May 2021
The ability to concurrently maintain representations of multiple objects and their locations in visual working memory is severely limited. Thus, making optimal use of visual working memory requires continual, moment-to-moment monitoring of its fidelity: High-fidelity representations can be relied upon, whereas incomplete or fuzzy representations must be refreshed or ignored. Previous work showed that adults track the fidelity of their visual working memory. Here, we asked whether children, whose capacities for visual working memory are undergoing protracted development, also can do so. We showed 5- and 6-year-olds sets of 2-5 single-feature (Experiment 1) or multifeature (Experiment 2) objects hidden simultaneously in separate locations. We asked children to recall the location of one of the objects, then bet 0-3 resources on whether they were correct. In both experiments, we found that children's confidence in their visual working memory, as indexed by their bets, was correlated with their accuracy on each trial, controlling for task difficulty: Children bet higher when they were correct and lower when they were incorrect. Our results suggest that metacognitive awareness of the representational limits of visual working memory may emerge before working memory reaches stable capacity.
American Psychological Association. Journals Department, 750 First Street NE, Washington, DC 20002. Tel: 800-374-2721; Tel: 202-336-5510; Fax: 202-336-5502; e-mail: order@apa.org; Web site: http://www.apa.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Massachusetts (Boston)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A