Encoding colors and tones into working memory concurrently: A developmental investigation

Working memory serves as a means to accumulate information and reorganize it. Researchers have long assumed that the natural organization of information is one stream at a time. This logic leads to the expectation that, when two different series of stimuli are to be remembered, performance should be superior if the series are presented one before the other in succession, rather than concurrently. Moreover, different accounts of attentional limits lead to different expectations for the change in the ability to encode two sets across age groups in childhood. Testing children from first grade (6–7 years) to adulthood, we presented sequences of colored objects and tones in succession or concurrently (with one color accompanying an unrelated tone) and found that performance was equally good no matter which presentation method was used. The results for both presentation methods closely matched the intricate pattern of development observed by Cowan et al. (2018), who used successive presentation only. We found marked developmental improvement in the ability to retain materials in each modality without an increasing cost of attention-sharing between modalities. Humans at least from the elementary school years through young adulthood thus display an ability to accommodate and organize two concurrent streams of information.

Research Highlights

• Memory for stimuli from multiple modalities is relevant to school performance and learning; here we investigate how attention is shared between remembering colors and tones.
• Participants received four colors and/or four tones for subsequent recognition on a trial, with dual modalities presented successively (0.5 s per stimulus) or concurrently (0.5 s per pair).
• Successive versus concurrent presentation had little effect on recognition, and the marked increase in memory performance with age did not come from dividing attention during encoding or maintenance.
• Children as young as first grade thus can encode and organize for later recognition colors and concurrently-presented, but unrelated, tones.