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Direct linkForsberg, Alicia; Guitard, Dominic; Adams, Eryn J.; Pattanakul, Duangporn; Cowan, Nelson – Developmental Science, 2022
We explored the causal role of individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity in long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Our sample of 160 participants included 120 children (6-13-years old) and 40 young adults (18-24 years). Participants performed a WM task with images of unique everyday items, presented at varying set sizes.…
Descriptors: Long Term Memory, Short Term Memory, Individual Differences, Age Differences
Röer, Jan Philipp; Cowan, Nelson – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2021
In the cocktail party phenomenon, participants cannot attend to more than 1 stream of information, but sometimes detect their own name being presented in the irrelevant message during a selective listening task. Here we present a preregistered replication of the phenomenon, in which we also tested whether semantically unexpected words have a…
Descriptors: Attention, Listening, Individual Differences, Short Term Memory
Ünal, Zehra Emine; Forsberg, Alicia; Geary, David C.; Cowan, Nelson – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2022
We investigated the role of working memory in symbolic and spatial algebra and related tasks across five experiments. Each experiment combined a processing task (expression evaluation, arithmetic, coordinate plane, geometry, or mental rotation) with verbal and spatial memory loads in a dual-task design. Spatial memory was compromised in the…
Descriptors: Short Term Memory, Algebra, Verbal Ability, Spatial Ability
Forsberg, Alicia; Adams, Eryn J.; Cowan, Nelson – Developmental Science, 2023
We investigated how visual working memory (WM) develops with age across the early elementary school period (6-7 years), early adolescence (11-13 years), and early adulthood (18-25 years). The work focuses on changes in two parameters: the number of objects retained at least in part, and the amount of feature-detail remembered for such objects.…
Descriptors: Visual Perception, Short Term Memory, Age Differences, Elementary School Students
Belletier, Clément; Doherty, Jason M.; Graham, Agnieszka J.; Rhodes, Stephen; Cowan, Nelson; Naveh-Benjamin, Moshe; Barrouillet, Pierre; Camos, Valérie; Logie, Robert H. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2023
How working memory supports dual-task performance is the focus of a long-standing debate. Most previous research on this topic has focused on participant performance data. In three experiments, we investigated whether changes in participant-reported strategies across single- and dual-task conditions might help resolve this debate by offering new…
Descriptors: Short Term Memory, Theories, Cognitive Processes, Executive Function
Cowan, Nelson; Elliott, Emily M. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2023
We used the timing of serial recall in several situations to reveal important aspects of recall groupings that participants construct and the reasons those groupings occur. We examined the timing of responses in the recall of digit strings within two published experiments. Cowan, Saults, Elliott, and Moreno (2002) examined memory for nine-item…
Descriptors: Serial Ordering, Recall (Psychology), Reaction Time, Short Term Memory
AuBuchon, Angela M.; Elliott, Emily M.; Morey, Candice C.; Jarrold, Christopher; Cowan, Nelson; Adams, Eryn J.; Attwood, Meg; Bayram, Büsra; Blakstvedt, Taran Y.; Büttner, Gerhard; Castelain, Thomas; Cave, Shari; Crepaldi, Davide; Fredriksen, Eivor; Glass, Bret A.; Guitard, Dominic; Hoehl, Stefanie; Hosch, Alexis; Jeanneret, Stéphanie; Joseph, Tanya N.; Koch, Christopher; Lelonkiewicz, Jaroslaw R.; Meissner, Grace; Mendenhall, Whitney; Moreau, David; Ostermann, Thomas; Özdogru, Asil Ali; Padovani, Francesca; Poloczek, Sebastian; Röer, Jan Philipp; Schonberg, Christina; Tamnes, Christian K.; Tomasik, Martin J.; Valentini, Beatrice; Vergauwe, Evie; Vlach, Haley; Voracek, Martin – Journal of Cognition and Development, 2022
A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here, we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Phonology, Serial Ordering, Recall (Psychology)
Ricker, Timothy J.; Sandry, Joshua; Vergauwe, Evie; Cowan, Nelson – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2020
There is a long-standing debate over whether the passage of time causes forgetting from working memory, a process called trace decay. Researchers providing evidence against the existence of trace decay generally study memory by presenting familiar verbal memory items for 1 s or more per memory item, during the study period. In contrast,…
Descriptors: Familiarity, Short Term Memory, Time, Verbal Communication
Guitard, Dominic; Saint-Aubin, Jean; Cowan, Nelson – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2021
To recall a list of items just after the end of the presentation, participants must encode both the items and the order in which they were presented. Despite a long history of studying item and order information, little is known regarding the relation between them. Here, we examined this issue with a novel task in which participants saw two 4- or…
Descriptors: Interference (Learning), Recall (Psychology), Task Analysis, Item Analysis
Cowan, Nelson – Child Development, 2021
The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, 4th ed. includes two measures of working memory normed on children 2;6-7;7. The present analyses of the typically developing children (N = 1,591, 812 female, 779 male, with an ethnic distribution approximating the United States) provide new, theoretically important information about these…
Descriptors: Cognitive Development, Intelligence Tests, Young Children, Short Term Memory
Cowan, Nelson; AuBuchon, Angela M.; Gilchrist, Amanda L.; Blume, Christopher L.; Boone, Alexander P.; Saults, J. Scott – Developmental Psychology, 2021
Younger children have more difficulty in sharing attention between two concurrent tasks than do older participants, but in addition to this developmental change, we documented changes in the nature of attention sharing. We studied children 6-8 and 10-14 years old and college students (in all, 104 women and 76 men; 3% Hispanic, 3% Black or African…
Descriptors: Age Differences, Individual Development, Children, Preadolescents
Adams, Eryn J.; Nguyen, Anh T.; Cowan, Nelson – Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 2018
Purpose: The purpose of this article is to review and discuss theories of working memory with special attention to their relevance to language processing. Method: We begin with an overview of the concept of working memory itself and review some of the major theories. Then, we show how theories of working memory can be organized according to their…
Descriptors: Short Term Memory, Attention, Language Processing, Language Research
Cowan, Nelson; Guitard, Dominic; Greene, Nathaniel R.; Fiset, Sylvain – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2022
In the traditional conception of working memory for word lists, phonological codes are used primarily, and semantic codes are often discarded or ignored. Yet, other evidence indicates an important role for semantic codes. We carried out a preplanned set of four experiments to determine whether phonological and semantic codes are used similarly or…
Descriptors: Phonology, Semantics, Short Term Memory, Rhyme
Gray, Shelley I.; Levy, Roy; Alt, Mary; Hogan, Tiffany P.; Cowan, Nelson – Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2022
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to use an established model of working memory in children to predict an established model of word learning to determine whether working memory explained word learning variance over and above the contributions of expressive vocabulary and nonverbal IQ. Method: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second…
Descriptors: Short Term Memory, Vocabulary, Expressive Language, Intelligence
Adams, Eryn J.; Cowan, Nelson – Journal of Cognition and Development, 2021
Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…
Descriptors: Short Term Memory, Young Children, Syntax, Cognitive Processes
