The modified Brown-Peterson task: a tool to directly compare children and adult's working memory

The study had 2 major purposes. First, it showed that the same task (Brown-Peterson task) can be used to test the memory abilities of both young children and adults, given an appropriate distracter task. Second, it illustrated that children can perform as accurately as adults on working memory tasks when prompted to use memory techniques such as rehearsal. Specifically, a modified version of the Brown-Peterson task (typically used with adults), tested working memory of adults and children aged 5-6 years. The modification was reciting the pledge of allegiance as the distracter task, as the pledge is at a level where young children are just learning it, and thus they know it, but not exceptionally well. Adults would have previously overlearned it as children but may not have recited it recently. This allows for the use of the same distracter task, thus allowing for a direct comparison of children and adults. Under experimental conditions, both groups showed a typical Brown-Peterson decay curve, with children showing a steeper decay than adults. With no distracter, adults performed at ceiling level, but only when rehearsal was encouraged did the accuracy of recalling the trigrams in the Brown-Peterson task improve for children, resulting in similar performance as adults.