L’utilisation des mécanismes de maintien de l’information verbale en mémoire de travail chez l’enfant de 8 ans

La mémoire de travail est une forme de mémoire immédiate qui permet de retenir des informations tout en effectuant simultanément un traitement sur ces informations ou sur d’autres informations. Elle est indispensable dans la vie quotidienne, par exemple sans elle nous serions incapable de comprendre une phrase ou de résoudre une opération. Les informations stockées dans cette mémoire ne peuvent être maintenues que pendant un très bref instant (± 2 secondes). Cependant, il est possible de les retenir pendant une plus longue durée en utilisant des mécanismes de maintien. Actuellement deux mécanismes de maintien ont été mis en évidence. Le premier est un mécanisme de répétition subvocale, qui …

Déclin temporel de l'information en mémoire chez l'enfant de 4 à 6 ans

National audience

Homme et animal, la question des frontières.

214 pages; Certains arguments permettent aujourd'hui de réévaluer la thèse de la singularité de l'homme. Du point de vue de l'identité psychologique et des performances cognitives, la différence entre les grands singes et l'homme ne serait pas de nature mais seulement de degrés. La biologie considère également les distinctions homme/animaux comme des différences dans la nature, et non entre nature et culture. Au plan éthique, les formes d'appropriation des animaux ont conduit à les instrumentaliser. À cela s'ajoutent les menaces sur les espèces sauvages dues au développement industriel. Certains admettent ainsi une véritable solidarité d'ordre moral ou juridique entre les formes de vie huma…

Motor activity could help young children to counteract forgetting in short-term memory

International audience

Developmental Increase in Working Memory Span: Resource Sharing or Temporal Decay?

Working memory span tasks require participants to maintain items in short-term memory while performing some concurrent processing (e.g., reading, counting, and problem solving). It has been suggested that the difficulty of these tasks results either from the necessity of sharing a limited resource pool between processing and storage (Case’s cognitive space hypothesis) or from the fact that the memory traces suffer from a temporal decay while the concurrent task is being performed (Towse and Hitch’s memory decay hypothesis). We tested these two hypotheses by comparing children’s performance in tasks in which the processing component always had the same duration but varied in cognitive cost (…

Two maintenance mechanisms of verbal information in working memory

Abstract The present study evaluated the interplay between two mechanisms of maintenance of verbal information in working memory, namely articulatory rehearsal as described in Baddeley’s model, and attentional refreshing as postulated in Barrouillet and Camos’s Time-Based Resource-Sharing (TBRS) model. In four experiments using complex span paradigm, we manipulated the degree of articulatory suppression and the attentional load of the processing component to affect orthogonally the two mechanisms of maintenance. In line with previous neurophysiological evidence reported in the literature, behavioral results suggest that articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing are two independent m…

Adult counting is resource demanding.

Several recent studies on both the development of counting and working-memory span tasks have provided results that could be interpreted as ruling out any cognitive resource model for counting. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that, even in adults, counting is a demanding task that requires the allocation of cognitive resources. In a first experiment, we asked adults to count arrays of dots while maintaining 5 items in memory (either digits or letters). As we predicted, the concurrent memory load did not increase the rate of errors but induced longer counting times. In a second experiment, we asked adults to count using either the numeric chain or the alphabet while they mai…

Do mental processes share a domain-general resource?

What determines success and failure in dual-task situations? Many theories propose that the extent to which two activities can be performed concurrently depends on the nature of the information involved in the activities. In particular, verbal and visuospatial activities are thought to be fueled by distinct resources, so that interference occurs between two verbal activities or two visuospatial activities, but little or no interference occurs between verbal and visuospatial activities. The current study examined trade-offs in four dual-task situations in which participants maintained verbal or visuospatial information while concurrently processing either verbal or visuospatial information.…

The Phonological Similarity Effect and The Word Length Effect: Hints for Maintenance Mechanisms in Working Memory

International audience; While in Baddeley’s Working Memory model (Baddeley, 1986), the maintenance of verbal information depends on the availability of an articulatory rehearsal mechanism, within the Time-Based Resource-Sharing model (Barrouillet et al., 2007), it depends on an attentional refreshing mechanism. The interplay of these two mechanisms was investigated in two experiments, one in adults and one in 7-year-old children. In both experiments, the phonological similarity of the words to remember, the articulatory suppression (AS) and the attentional load of concurrent processing were manipulated within a complex span paradigm. Results replicated the classic effects of phonological si…

Progressions scolaires, mémoire de travail et origine sociale : quels liens à l'école élémentaire ?

08035; Issu d'une recherche portant sur la structure et l'évolution des acquisitions à l'école élémentaire, cet article se focalise sur les liens entre les apprentissages scolaires et les capacités cognitives appréhendées par la mémoire de travail. Reposant sur une approche longitudinale, l'article vise à mettre en évidence la relation qui existe entre la mémoire de travail et les acquisitions scolaires au cours du cycle III. Le lien entre mémoire de travail et origine sociale est également examiné. Les résultats offrent des pistes de réflexion en matière de politique éducative, notamment quant au développement d'activités susceptibles de réduire les écarts sociaux et cognitifs entre les él…

Maintien de l'information en mémoire de travail chez l'enfant de 4 à 6 ans : impact d'une activité motrice orientée vers un but

National audience

Evolution et structure des compétences des élèves à l'école élémentaire et au collège : une analyse empirique des évaluations nationales

Le rapport est structuré en plusieurs parties. Le premire chapitre propose l'analyse détaillée des résultats des élèves aux évaluations de CE2. Le second chapitre traite de deux points : l'identification de compétences sur une base empirique (analyse en variables latentes) et l'analyse des relations entre ces compétences. Le troisième chapitre s'intéresse à la mesure de l'évolution des compétences au cours du cycle III et propose également une mise en relation entre les compétences scolaires et les capacités cognitives des élèves. Le quatrième chapitre se centre sur l'analyse des résultats des élèves aux évaluations de fin de 5ème.

Numerosity Discrimination in Children With Down Syndrome

To understand the difficulties in mathematics exhibited by children with Down syndrome (DS), this study evaluated the core knowledge of numerosities with a discrimination task adapted from Xu and Spelke (2000). Although continuous variables varying with numerosity were controlled, children with DS discriminated the numerosity 8 from 16, but not from 12. Moreover, their performance did not differ from typically developing children matched either on chronological or mental age. Thus, the approximate numerosity system that recruits parietal lobes (Dehaene, Spelke, Pinel, Stanescu, & Tsivkin, 1999) is efficient in children with DS. These findings point at language-based systems as the source of…

The role of attention in preschoolers’ working memory

Abstract Recent studies showed that introducing an unfilled delay or a secondary task between encoding and recall reduces recall performance in preschoolers, whereas increasing the attentional demand of this secondary task does not. Based on these results, different authors drew opposing conclusions regarding the use of attention in preschoolers’ memory maintenance. This study aimed to bring further evidence to bear on the issue. In two experiments, recall was reduced when an unfilled delay was introduced before recall, but also when the demand of the concurrent task increased. These effects did not interact with age, although performance improved from 4 to 6 years of age. A third experimen…

What makes working memory spans so predictive of high-level cognition?

Working memory (WM) span tasks involving a complex activity performed concurrently with item retention have proven to be good predictors of high-level cognitive performance. The present study demonstrates that replacing these complex self-paced activities with simpler but computer-paced processes, such as reading successive letters, yields more predictive WM span measures. This finding suggests that WM span tasks evaluate a fundamental capacity that underpins complex as well as elementary cognitive processes. Moreover, the higher predictive power of computer-paced WM span tasks suggests that strategic factors do not contribute to the relationship between WM spans and high-level cognition.

Olfactory abilities and behaviour in 6-12 year-old French children

Dissociation mémoire de travail-vitesse de traitement chez les enfants intellectuellement précoces au travers de deux études de cas

Resume Recemment, il a ete montre que les differences developpementales observees en memoire de travail tenaient en grande partie a une augmentation de la vitesse de traitement de l’information avec l’âge. La litterature rapporte tres souvent que les enfants intellectuellement precoces ou a haut potentiel intellectuel presenteraient une avance developpementale par rapport a leurs pairs de meme âge. Cette avance se situerait principalement dans les fonctions sous controle du cortex prefrontal. Le but de cette recherche est d’illustrer au travers de l’etude de deux cas d’enfants intellectuellement precoces, la variete des profils pouvant etre observes dans cette population. En fait, malgre un…

Phonological similarity effect in complex span task

The aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that two systems are involved in verbal working memory; one is specifically dedicated to the maintenance of phonological representations through verbal rehearsal while the other would maintain multimodal representations through attentional refreshing. This theoretical framework predicts that phonologically related phenomena such as the phonological similarity effect (PSE) should occur when the domain-specific system is involved in maintenance, but should disappear when concurrent articulation hinders its use. Impeding maintenance in the domain-general system by a concurrent attentional demand should impair recall performance without affecting…

Does the Coordination of Verbal and Motor Information Explain the Development of Counting in Children?

Counting is often considered to be the coordination of two actions: saying the number-words and pointing to each object. We report three experiments to test the hypothesis that this coordination requires the use of the central executive (A. D. Baddeley, 1990), and that the cost of coordination decreases with age. Participants were 5- and 9-year-old children and adults. At all ages tested, the manipulation of the difficulty of each component affected counting performance but did not make coordination more difficult. These results suggest that, at least from the age 5, counting is a procedure in which the control of coordination is not attention demanding.

Attitudes toward everyday odors for children with visual impairments: A pilot study

The question of how the processing of stimuli from the external world is organized or reorganized when a sensory modality is altered or missing has been the subject of numerous studies, although the studies have mostly been on tactile and auditory abilities (Hatwell, 2003). In contrast, olfaction has been poorly investigated in people who are visually impaired, despite the increasing evidence that humans have a keen sense of smell (Schaal & Porter, 1991). Odors influence mood; well-being (Ehrlichman & Bastone, 1992); and social interactions, such as the choice of partners (Herz & Inzlicht, 2002). Emotional and social implications of odors go back to the earliest periods of development (Scha…

Rôle du langage intérieur dans la flexibilité mentale – Étude électromyographique

no abstract

Improvement of working memory performance by training is not transferable

Working memory (WM) usually refers to a cognitive system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information which plays a crucial role in high-level cognition. Recently, Barrouillet and collaborators showed the importance of controlling the time course of cognitive activities to assess WM capacities. Therefore, they developed a new paradigm to systematically explore the functioning of WM that involved simple but time-constrained activities as processing component. In comparison with traditional tasks, these computer-paced span tasks provide a more accurate evaluation of WM capacities and turned out to be the most predictive of complex cognitive achievements. The present s…

Elaboration d'un paradigme d'évaluation de la mémoire de travail chez l'enfant d'école maternelle

National audience

Comment la répétition articulatoire et le rafraichissement attentionnel interagissent avec la similarité phonologique ?

Within Time-Based Resource-Sharing model (Barrouillet et al., 2004), working memory capacity depends on the amount of attention available to maintain information. The aim of this study was to investigate the interplay of attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal (Baddeley, 1986). The phonological similarity effect was investigated in a complex span paradigm using lists of similar or dissimilar words to remember. In Experiment 1, the amount of attention available was manipulated by the attentional demand of the concurrent processing task (Simple Reaction Task vs Choice Reaction Task), and in Experiment 2 by varying the pace of stimulus presentation in the CRT. Moreover, in Experiment…

Human awareness and uses of odor cues in everyday life: Results from a questionnaire study in children

The Children's Olfactory Behavior in Everyday Life questionnaire was developed to assess attention to, and uses of, odors in real-life situations, and to evaluate individual variations. The tool comprises 16 items prompting self-reports of active seeking, awareness and affective reactivity to odors of food, people and the environment. Children (102 girls, 113 boys) aged 6–10 years participated in the study. The results revealed that girls were significantly more olfaction-oriented than boys, especially towards the odors of people, self and the environment. An increasing ability of children to describe the odor facets of their perceptual world was found between 6 and 10 years, partly due to …

Two systems of maintenance in verbal working memory: evidence from the word length effect.

The extended time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) model suggested a working memory architecture in which an executive loop and a phonological loop could both support the maintenance of verbal information. The consequence of such a framework is that phonological effects known to impact the maintenance of verbal information, like the word length effect (WLE), should depend on the use of the phonological loop, but should disappear under the maintenance by the executive loop. In two previous studies, introducing concurrent articulation in complex span tasks barely affected WLE, contradicting the prediction from the TBRS model. The present study re-evaluated the WLE in a complex span task while co…

Word-frequency effect on working memory task

Many studies have shown an advantage for high-frequency words in various language and memory tasks. Surprisingly, only one study reported a word-frequency effect in a working memory task (Engle et al., 1990). In the present study, we evaluated the word-frequency effect in complex span task in which the pace of a concurrent task was manipulated. By slowing down the pace of a location judgement task, attention could be switched to maintenance activities for a longer time and recall should be better (Barrouillet et al., 2007). As already reported in immediate serial recall tasks, the advantage for recalling high-frequency words increased across serial positions. This finding is congruent with …

Adaptive Choice in Strategies of Maintenance in Verbal Working Memory

International audience; Because both articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing aid the maintenance of verbal information at the short term, the present study evaluated the adaptive use of these mechanisms, using a complex span paradigm. In Experiment 1, phonological similarity of memory-list words and attentional demand of concurrent processing were manipulated. As was predicted, a phonological similarity effect (PSE) appeared only when the concurrent task was attention demanding, thus impairing the use of refreshing and encouraging rehearsal. To verify that PSE indicates the use of rehearsal, participants were instructed to use one of the two mechanisms in Experiments 2 and 3. In a…

Production de langage intériorisé dans l'exécution d'activités complexes alternées en fonction de l'âge

no abstract

An investigation of maintenance mechanisms in working memory through phonological similarity and word length effects

International audience; While in Baddeley’s Working Memory model (Baddeley, 1986), the maintenance of verbal information depends on the availability of an articulatory rehearsal mechanism, within the Time-Based Resource-Sharing model (Barrouillet et al., 2007), it depends on an attentional refreshing mechanism, i.e. on the amount of attention available to refresh traces. The interplay of these two mechanisms, the articulatory rehearsal and the attentional refreshing, was investigated in two experiments, one in adults and one in 7-year-old children. In both experiments, within a complex span paradigm, the phonological similarity of the words to remember (similar vs dissimilar), the articulat…

Young children's decay of memory traces in short-term memory

International audience

How do articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing interact with phonological similarity in the complex span paradigm?

Within Time-Based Resource-Sharing model (Barrouillet et al., 2004), working memory capacity depends on the amount of attention available to maintain information. The aim of this study was to investigate the interplay of attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal (Baddeley, 1986). The phonological similarity effect was investigated in a complex span paradigm using lists of similar or dissimilar words to remember. In Experiment 1, the amount of attention available was manipulated by the attentional demand of the concurrent processing task (Simple Reaction Task vs Choice Reaction Task), and in Experiment 2 by varying the pace of stimulus presentation in the CRT. Moreover, in Experiment…

Inner speech and task switching in adults

no abstract

Working Memory in Children: A Time-Constrained Functioning Similar to Adults

International audience; Within the Time-Based Resource-Sharing (TBRS) model, we tested a new conception of the relationships between processing and storage in which the core mechanisms of WM are time constrained. However, our previous studies were restricted to adults. The present study aimed at demonstrating that these mechanisms are present and functional before adulthood. For this purpose, we investigated the effect on maintenance of the duration of the attentional capture induced by processing. In two experiments using computer-paced WM span tasks, 10- year-old children were asked to maintain letters while performing spatial location judgments. The duration of this processing was manipu…

Forgetting at Short Term: When do Event-Based Interference and Temporal Factors Have an Effect?

International audience; Memory tasks combining storage and distracting tasks performed at either encoding or retrieval have provided divergent results pointing towards accounts of forgetting in terms of either temporal decay or event-based interference respectively. The aim of this study was to shed light on the possible sources of such a divergence that could rely on methodological aspects or deeper differences in the memory traces elicited by the different paradigms used. Methodological issues were explored in a first series of experiments by introducing at retrieval computer-paced distracting tasks that involved articulatory suppression, attentional demand, or both. A second series of ex…

The Effect of Long-Term Memory Knowledge on Rehearsal and Refreshing in Working Memory

It was suggested that the impact of long-term knowledge on short-term memory (STM) could either be at encoding and maintenance or at recall (Thorn, Frankish, & Gathercole, 2009). In two experiments, we manipulated the characteristics of long-term knowledge through word-frequency or lexicality. We also varied the implication of the mechanisms of maintenance, refreshing or rehearsal. First, the effect of long-term knowledge on refreshing was investigated manipulating frequency of words to remember and attentional load of the concurrent processing. No interaction between word frequency and cognitive load was found. A second experiment investigated the effect of long-term knowledge on both rehe…

Forgetting in immediate serial recall: time vs. interference. When the encoding rates determine the winner

Maintenance of item and order information in verbal working memory

International audience; Although verbal recall of item and order information is well-researched in short-term memory paradigms, there is relatively little research concerning item and order recall from working memory. The following study examined whether manipulating the opportunity for attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal in a complex span task differently affected the recall of item- and order-specific information of the memoranda. Five experiments varied the opportunity for articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing in a complex span task, but the type of recall was manipulated between experiments (item and order, order only, and item only recall). The results showed …