Developmental Abilities to Form Chunks in Immediate Memory and Its Non-Relationship to Span Development.

ABSTRACT: Both adults and children -by the time they are 2-3 years old- have a general ability to recode information to increase memory efficiency. This paper aims to evaluate the ability of untrained children aged 6-10 years old to deploy such a recoding process in immediate memory. A large sample of 374 children were given a task of immediate serial report based on SIMON®, a classic memory game made of four colored buttons (red, green, yellow, blue) requiring players to reproduce a sequence of colors within which repetitions eventually occur. It was hypothesized that a primitive ability across all ages (since theoretically already available in toddlers) to detect redundancies allows the span to increase whenever information can be recoded on the fly. The chunkable condition prompted the formation

SUBMITTER: Mathy F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4763062 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature