Developmental and individual differences in the precision of visuospatial memory

Our ability to retain visuospatial information over brief periods of time is severely limited and develops gradually. In childhood, visuospatial short-term and working memory are typically indexed using span-based measures. However, whilst these standardized measures have been successful in characterizing developmental and individual differences, each individual trial only provides a binary measure of a child’s performance—they are either correct or incorrect. Here we used a novel continuous report paradigm, in combination with probabilistic modeling, to explore developmental and individual differences in how likely children were to recall memoranda, and how precisely they could report them. Taking this approach revealed a number of novel findings: (i) a concurrent processing demand negatively impacted upon both of these parameters, increasing the guessing rate and making children less precise; (ii) older children (aged 10–12, N = 20) were significantly less likely to guess, but when they did remember the target were no more precise in reporting it than younger children (aged 7–9, N = 20); (iii) children’s performance on standardized short-term and working memory tasks was significantly associated with both the guessing likelihood, and the precision of target responding, on the continuous report task. In short, we show that continuous report paradigms can offer interesting insight into processes that underlie developmental and individual differences in visuospatial memory in childhood.