Part of the Bristol and Bath Psychology seminar series jointly hosted by both the School of Psychological Science and the Department of Psychology, respectively.
Abstract: Working memory is the cognitive system that keeps information temporarily accessible and available for ongoing thought and action. The capacity of working memory is limited and undergoes important developmental changes during childhood. One proposed reason for the expansion of working memory capacity during childhood is the emergence and increased efficiency of active, domain-general maintenance mechanisms. In particular, attention-based reactivation, or refreshing, has received much attention in the last 15 years. Refreshing is a proposed mechanism to keep information active in working memory by bringing memory items back into the focus of attention. One prevalent view is that the spontaneous use of attention-based refreshing emerges around the age of 7, and becomes more efficient during middle childhood and beyond. While this view seems generally supported by the available data, a more detailed look at these data suggests that the development of refreshing may be more complicated than previously thought. Here, I will present some of our lab’s research on (1) the spontaneous use of refreshing across different task materials and different task situations in school-aged children, and (2) the effectiveness of instructed refreshing in these children. I will use the observed (in)consistencies across different lines of research to show how, together, our findings are incompatible with the notion that attention-based refreshing plays a key role in keeping information in mind, at least during middle childhood.
Bio: I obtained my master's degree in theoretical and experimental psychology at the University of Ghent (Belgium) in 2006, before obtaining my PhD in Psychology in 2010 at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where I worked with Professor Pierre Barrouillet. Next, I was a postdoc for almost three years in the lab of Professor Nelson Cowan, at the University of Missouri (USA). Two SNSF research fellowships later, I am now an associate professor and Chair of Cognitive Development at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Geneva. My lab’s research is concerned with (1) how working memory is structured and how it functions, but also the determinants of its limited capacity, (2) the role of working memory in the high-level cognitive abilities, such as reasoning or prospective memory, and (3) the development of working memory during childhood.