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Five-Year-Old Children’s Working Memory Can Be Improved When Children Act On A Transparent Goal Cue
Working memory is a key component of human cognition and its development throughout childhood a major predictor of cognitive development and school achievement. Noticeably, preschoolers exhibit poor performance in working memory tasks. The present study aimed at testing different means to improve wo...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6814763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31653944 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51869-4 |
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author | Fitamen, Christophe Blaye, Agnès Camos, Valérie |
author_facet | Fitamen, Christophe Blaye, Agnès Camos, Valérie |
author_sort | Fitamen, Christophe |
collection | PubMed |
description | Working memory is a key component of human cognition and its development throughout childhood a major predictor of cognitive development and school achievement. Noticeably, preschoolers exhibit poor performance in working memory tasks. The present study aimed at testing different means to improve working memory performance in preschoolers. To this aim, we tested the effect of abstract and transparent goal cues in a Brown-Peterson task performed by 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers. If the transparent goal cue helps to better maintain the instructions, it should lead to better memory performance. Moreover, preschoolers had to track, either visually or with their fingers, the goal cue during the retention interval. If the motor activity favors the active engagement of the children in the task, the finger tracking should lead to improvement in memory performance. Our findings were that 5-year-old children benefitted from a transparent goal cue when they acted on it, while 4-year-old children did not show any improvement. These results suggest that working memory performance can be improved in 5-year-old children when the task embeds elements that can scaffold the task goal. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6814763 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-68147632019-10-30 Five-Year-Old Children’s Working Memory Can Be Improved When Children Act On A Transparent Goal Cue Fitamen, Christophe Blaye, Agnès Camos, Valérie Sci Rep Article Working memory is a key component of human cognition and its development throughout childhood a major predictor of cognitive development and school achievement. Noticeably, preschoolers exhibit poor performance in working memory tasks. The present study aimed at testing different means to improve working memory performance in preschoolers. To this aim, we tested the effect of abstract and transparent goal cues in a Brown-Peterson task performed by 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers. If the transparent goal cue helps to better maintain the instructions, it should lead to better memory performance. Moreover, preschoolers had to track, either visually or with their fingers, the goal cue during the retention interval. If the motor activity favors the active engagement of the children in the task, the finger tracking should lead to improvement in memory performance. Our findings were that 5-year-old children benefitted from a transparent goal cue when they acted on it, while 4-year-old children did not show any improvement. These results suggest that working memory performance can be improved in 5-year-old children when the task embeds elements that can scaffold the task goal. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-10-25 /pmc/articles/PMC6814763/ /pubmed/31653944 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51869-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Fitamen, Christophe Blaye, Agnès Camos, Valérie Five-Year-Old Children’s Working Memory Can Be Improved When Children Act On A Transparent Goal Cue |
title | Five-Year-Old Children’s Working Memory Can Be Improved When Children Act On A Transparent Goal Cue |
title_full | Five-Year-Old Children’s Working Memory Can Be Improved When Children Act On A Transparent Goal Cue |
title_fullStr | Five-Year-Old Children’s Working Memory Can Be Improved When Children Act On A Transparent Goal Cue |
title_full_unstemmed | Five-Year-Old Children’s Working Memory Can Be Improved When Children Act On A Transparent Goal Cue |
title_short | Five-Year-Old Children’s Working Memory Can Be Improved When Children Act On A Transparent Goal Cue |
title_sort | five-year-old children’s working memory can be improved when children act on a transparent goal cue |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6814763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31653944 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51869-4 |
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