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 …

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 (…

Predicting arithmetical achievement from neuro-psychological performance: a longitudinal study

In this article, we show that the performances of 5- to 6-year-old children in arithmetic tests can be predicted from their performances in neuro-psychological tests administered a number of months in advance, independently of their level of development.

Conditional reasoning by mental models: chronometric and developmental evidence

The aim of this article is to verify two predictions resulting from the mental models theory of conditional reasoning. First, the denial of antecedent (DA) and modus tollens (MT) inferences should take longer to verify than modus ponens (MP) and affirmation of consequent (AC) because the former require subjects to flesh out the initial model whereas the latter do not. This prediction was confirmed in two reaction time experiments in adults. In line with Evans' proposal (Evans, J. St. B. T. (1993). The mental model theory of conditional reasoning: critical appraisal and revision. Cognition, 48, 1-20), there was a strong directionality effect: inferences from antecedent to consequent (MP and …

Delays of retention, processing efficiency, and attentional resources in working memory span development

Working memory span tasks require participants to maintain items in short-term memory while performing some concurrent processing (e.g., reading, counting, or problem solving). The present series of experiments contrasted two models of the development of working memory spans in children. Is this development mainly due to faster completion of the processing component in older children, as Towse and Hitch (1995) suggested, or is it due to resource-related phenomena such as increased processing efficiency and a greater amount of available cognitive resources? Using new computer-paced working memory span tasks that allow a careful control of processing duration, we demonstrate that the cognitiv…

From algorithmic computing to direct retrieval: Evidence from number and alphabetic arithmetic in children and adults

A number of theories of mental arithmetic suggest that the ability to solve simple addition and subtraction problems develops from an algorithmic strategy toward a strategy based on the direct retrieval of the result from memory. In the experiment presented here, 2nd and 12th graders were asked to solve two tasks of number and alphabet arithmetic. The subjects transformed series of 1 to 4 numbers or letters (item span) by adding or subtracting an operand varying from 1 to 4 (operation span). Although both the item and operation span were associated with major and identical effects in the case of both numbers and letters at 2nd grade, such effects were clearly observable only in the case of …

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…

Algorithmic Solution of Arithmetic Problems and Operands-Answer Associations in Long-Term Memory

Many developmental models of arithmetic problem solving assume that any algorithmic solution of a given problem results in an association of the two operands and the answer in memory (Logan & Klapp, 1991; Siegler, 1996). In this experiment, adults had to perform either an operation or a comparison on the same pairs of two-digit numbers and then a recognition task. It is shown that unlike comparisons, the algorithmic solution of operations impairs the recognition of operands in adults. Thus, the postulate of a necessary and automatic storage of operands-answer associations in memory when young children solve additions by algorithmic strategies needs to be qualified.

Schematic or taxonomic organisation of the reality and the development of class logic

Abstract The experiment studied the effect of various methods of organising reality (taxonomic vs. schematic) on success in inclusion and logical complementation tasks. Seventy-two nine-year-old children were divided into four groups on the basis of their logical structuring abilities. Using three sets of material (Animals, Plants, Means of Transportation), the subjects performed a sorting task and an evaluation task in which the taxonomic and schematic modes of organising reality were opposed. Contrary to our hypothesis, the ″;logical included' did not exhibit a greater capacity for taxonomic organisation than the “empirical includers” of the same age, either in the sorting or the evaluati…

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…

The Development of Conditional Reasoning: A Mental Model Account

Abstract Conditional (if-then) reasoning is one of the key components of logical reasoning. Studies examining the way that children and adults make conditional inferences have shown that while there are some clear developmental patterns, there is also a great deal of variation in performance due to factors such as problem content. Such variation is difficult to model without an explicit process model. In the following we propose a variant of mental model theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983) that can explain much of the empirical data. This model suggests that the development of conditional reasoning can be explained, at least partly, by such factors as the capacity of working memory, the range of k…

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.

Content and context effects in children's and adults' conditional reasoning

We have recently shown that children interpret conditional sentences with binary terms (e.g., male/female) in both the antecedent and the consequent as biconditionals (Barrouillet & Lecas, 1998). We hypothesized that the same effect can be obtained with conditionals that do not contain binary terms provided that they are embedded in a context that restricts to only two the possible values on both the antecedent and the consequent. In the present experiment, we asked 12-year-old children, 15-year-old children, and adults to draw conclusions from conditional syllogisms that involved three types of conditional sentence: (1) conditionals with binary terms (BB), (2) conditionals with non-bi…

How can mental models theory account for content effects in conditional reasoning? A developmental perspective

Abstract This article proposes a modification to Johnson-Laird's mental models theory applied to the interpretation of conditional statement of the form `if...then'. The model suggests that this interpretation is based on the construction of mental models supplied by establishing a correspondence between the semantic spaces associated with the antecedent and consequent of the statements. The construction of the models and the interpretation of the statements would depend on the nature of the semantic spaces involved, the interpretative context and the subject's knowledge and processing capacity. Three experiments show that the interpretation of conditional rules depends, for example, on whe…

Chronometric evidence for memory retrieval in causal conditional reasoning: The case of the association strength effect

According to many models of conditional reasoning, correct responses to the uncertain forms affirmation of consequent (AC) and denial of antecedent (DA) rely on the retrieval of an alternative antecedent from semantic memory. The main prediction issuing from this hypothesis of online retrieval is that the associative strength of the relevant information in long-term memory affects the latency of its retrieval and then of the correct response of uncertainty to AC and DA. This prediction was tested in 64 adults who performed a syllogism evaluation task with familiar causal conditional premises. As predicted, correct responses of uncertainty to AC and DA were not only more frequent but also fa…

Selecting between Competitors in Multiplication Tasks: An Explanation of the Errors Produced by Adolescents with Learning Difficulties

Two experiments were conducted in order to determine the nature of the difficulties encountered by learning disabled (LD) adolescents in the resolution of multiplication problems ( a b, where a and b vary between 2 and 9). A response production task (Experiment 1) revealed that the incorrect responses generally belonged to the table of one of the two operands, and that the order of difficulty of the problems was the same for the LDs as for normal children, adolescents, and educated adults as reported in the literature. This result suggests that the difficulties are not solely due to memory problems. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that these difficulties were caused by a problem in inhi…

Un nouveau modèle de transcodage des nombres : aspects développementaux, neuropsychologiques et computationnels

Ce texte est un rapport de fin de recherche issu de l'ACI cognitique.; L'objectif du projet était de produire et valider empiriquement un modèle développemental de transcodage des nombres de leur forme verbale (orale ou écrite) vers leur forme en chiffres. Le modèle, baptisé ADAPT (A Developmental Asemantic Procedural Transcoding model), est un système de production qui transforme un input verbal en chaîne de chiffres par la mise en œuvre de procédures. Celles-ci lisent le contenu de la mémoire de travail et le transforment en récupérant en mémoire à long terme des associations entre formes verbales et formes en chiffres. L'originalité du modèle est sa capacité à apprendre à partir de son f…

Developmental and content effects in reasoning with causal conditionals.

Abstract Two predictions derived from Markovits and Barrouillet's (2001) developmental model of conditional reasoning were tested in a study in which 72 twelve-year-olds, 80 fifteen-year-olds, and 104 adults received a paper-and-pencil test of conditional reasoning with causal premises (“if cause P then effect Q”). First, we predicted that conditional premises would induce more correct uncertainty responses to the Affirmation of the consequent and Denial of the antecedent forms when the antecedent term is weakly associated to the consequent than when the two are strongly associated and that this effect would decrease with age. Second, uncertainty responding to the Denial of the antecedent f…

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…

Why does placing the question before an arithmetic word problem improve performance. A situation model account.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the controversial issue of the nature of the representation constructed by individuals to solve arithmetic word problems. More precisely, we consider the relevance of two different theories: the situation or mental model theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Reusser, 1989) and the schema theory (Kintsch & Greeno, 1985; Riley, Greeno, & Heller, 1983). Fourth-graders who differed in their mathematical skills were presented with problems that varied in difficulty and with the question either before or after the text. We obtained the classic effect of the position of the question, with better performance when the question was presented prior to the text. …

Encoding numbers: behavioral evidence for processing-specific representations.

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis of a complex encoding of numbers according to which each numerical processing requires a specific representational format for input. In three experiments, adult participants were given two numbers presented successively on screen through a self-presentation procedure after being asked to add, to subtract, or to compare them. We considered the self-presentation time of the first number as reflecting the complexity of the encoding for a given planned processing. In line with Dehaene's triple-code model, self-presentation times were longer for additions and subtractions than for comparisons with two-digit numbers but longer for subtractions than…

Illusory inferences from a disjunction of conditionals: a new mental models account

(Johnson-Laird, P.N., & Savary, F. (1999, Illusory inferences: a novel class of erroneous deductions. Cognition, 71, 191-229.) have recently presented a mental models account, based on the so-called principle of truth, for the occurrence of inferences that are compelling but invalid. This article presents an alternative account of the illusory inferences resulting from a disjunction of conditionals. In accordance with our modified theory of mental models of the conditional, we show that the way individuals represent conditionals leads them to misinterpret the locus of the disjunction and prevents them from drawing conclusions from a false conditional, thus accounting for the compelling char…

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…

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

Working memory and children’s use of retrieval to solve addition problems

This study tested the hypothesis that children with high working memory capacities solve single-digit additions by direct retrieval of the answers from long-term memory more often than do children with low working memory capacities. Counting and reading letter span tasks were administered to groups of third-grade (mean age=107 months) and fourth-grade (mean age=118 months) children who were also asked to solve 40 single-digit additions. High working memory capacity was associated with more frequent use of retrieval and faster responses in solving additions. The effect of span on the use of retrieval increased with the size of the minimum addend. The relation between working memory measures …

Impact de la nature et du rythme de réalisation de la tâche secondaire dans les tâches d'empan et de mémoire de travail

National audience; Les tâches d'empan de mémoire de travail sont des tâches dans lesquelles des items doivent être maintenus en mémoire à court terme pendant qu'un traitement concurrent est effectué. Le but de la présente étude était de déterminer si, comme le soutient le modèle de partage temporel des ressources (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004), les traitements gênent le maintien parce que les deux composantes entrent en compétition pour des processus communs ou plus simplement parce que les stratégies de maintien des items à rappeler sont perturbées par l'intrusion de l'information à traiter simultanément. Quatre-vingt sujets adultes étaient soumis à une tâche d'empan où ils devaie…