Working memory in children assessed with serial chaining and Simon tasks.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Development
• Comparative Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Sequential planning and working memory are crucial executive functions.
• Understanding their development in children is essential for educational and clinical applications.
• Bridging comparative and developmental studies requires tasks applicable across species.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the emergence of working memory and sequential planning in preschool children.
• To examine the relationship between performance on serial chaining and Simon memory span tasks.
• To assess the utility of tasks developed for nonhuman animals in studying human child development.

Main Methods:

• Administered serial chaining task with masked Arabic numerals to 44 preschool children.
• Administered Simon memory span task with color sequences to 65 preschool children.
• Analyzed age-related differences and inter-task relationships.

Main Results:

• Older children demonstrated superior performance on both tasks compared to younger children.
• A significant positive correlation was found between scores on the serial chaining and Simon memory span tasks, even after controlling for age.
• Task performance indicates the emergence of working memory skills supporting planning capacities.

Conclusions:

• Working memory skills underpinning planning capacities emerge in early childhood.
• The serial chaining task, adapted from nonhuman animal studies, effectively measures these capacities in children.
• Both tasks show potential for measuring improvements in general executive functions across human and nonhuman species.