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ERIC Number: EJ1481846
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Sep
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1363-755X
EISSN: EISSN-1467-7687
Available Date: 2025-08-18
A Dotted "Triangle" or Dots of "Three": The Role of Representational Content on Working Memory Capacity in Early Childhood
Tongyan Ren1; Xuechen Ding1,2,3,4; Chen Cheng5
Developmental Science, v28 n5 e70066 2025
Working memory (WM) is a critical cognitive system that supports processing a variety of information. Remembering different types of objects may impose different levels of cognitive demands on WM performance. In the present study, we examined 205 children's WM in representing different types of content and its developmental trajectories in early childhood. Experiment 1 examined 5-year-olds' WM performance when remembering different content (animals and dots). To control perceptual differences, Experiment 2 compared the same-age children's WM performance when the stimuli (e.g., three dots) needed to be encoded from different representational domains (perceptual domain: visuospatial representation; conceptual domain: numerical representation). In Experiment 3, we further investigated the early developmental trends of representing different types of information in WM between the ages of 3 and 5. Results showed that children's WM performance varied over different types of stimuli. When presented with the same stimuli, encoding different aspects of the content (conceptual vs. perceptual) may impose different levels of cognitive demands, and the performance of which was dependent on the WM loads. Together these findings informed our understanding of the role of representational content in children's WM development and provided empirical implications for considering the testing stimuli when designing WM measurements for young children.
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www-wiley-com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Data File: URL: https://osf.io/m4fbq
Author Affiliations: 1School of Psychology, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China; 2Shanghai Experimental School, Shanghai, China; 3Lab for Educational Big Data and Policymaking, Ministry of Education, P. R. China, Shanghai, China; 4The Research Base of Online Education for Shanghai Middle and Primary Schools, Shanghai, China; 5Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China