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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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Fitamen, Christophe, Blaye, Agnès, Camos, Valérie
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
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.
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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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