Amanda L Gilchrist

Cottey College · Department of Psychology

A popular procedure for investigating working memory processes has been the visual change-detection procedure. Models of performance based on that procedure, however, tend to be based on performance accuracy and treat working memory search as a one-step process, in which memory representations are compared to a test probe to determine if a match is...

Why does visual working memory performance increase with age in childhood? One recent study (Cowan et al., 2010b) ruled out the possibility that the basic cause is a tendency in young children to clutter working memory with less-relevant items (within a concurrent array, colored items presented in one of two shapes). The age differences in memory p...

Researchers of working memory currently debate capacity limits of the focus of attention, the proposed mental faculty in which items are most easily accessed. Cowan (1999) suggested that its capacity is about 4 chunks, whereas others have suggested that its capacity is only 1 chunk. Recently, Oberauer and Bialkova (2009) found evidence that 2 items...

Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory performance increases with age in childhood, but it is not clear why. One main hypothesis has been that younger children are less efficient in their attention; specifically, they are less able to exclude irrelevant items from working memory to make room for relevant items. We examined this...

Previous studies show that older adults have poorer immediate recall for language but the reason is unknown. Older adults may recall fewer chunks from working memory, or may have difficulty binding words together to form multi-unit chunks. We examined these two hypotheses by presenting four types of spoken sentences for immediate free recall, diffe...

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 A...

Generally defined, chunking is a process through which one reorganizes or groups presented information to compress information; it is one of the best-known methods of increasing the amount of information stored in memory. Chunking can occur by two different means: either through strategic reorganization based on familiarity or prior knowledge, or t...

Research with younger adults has shown that retrospective cues can be used to orient top-down attention toward relevant items in working memory. We examined whether older adults could take advantage of these cues to improve memory performance. Younger and older adults were presented with visual arrays of five colored shapes; during maintenance, par...

Child development is accompanied by a robust increase in immediate memory. This may be due to either an increase in the number of items (chunks) that can be maintained in working memory or an increase in the size of those chunks. We tested these hypotheses by presenting younger and older children (7 and 12 years of age) and adults with different ty...

We review the evidence for various kinds of limit in the capability of working memory, the small amount of information that can be held in mind at once. To distinguish between types of limit in working memory, we invoke metaphors of space (capacity), time (decay and speed), and energy (control of attention). The review focuses primarily on recent e...

Some research on attentional control in working memory has emphasized theoretical capacity differences. However, strategic behavior, which has been relatively unexplored, can also influence attentional control and its relationship to cognitive performance. In two experiments, we examined the relationship between attentional control (measured with o...