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Updated: Oct 26, 2025
09:05
Assessing Working Memory in Children: The Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children – Working Memory (CABC-WM)
Published on: June 12, 2017
30.1K
Children's long-term retention is directly constrained by their working memory capacity limitations
Alicia Forsberg1, Dominic Guitard2, Eryn J Adams1
1University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA.
Developmental Science
|July 30, 2021
Summary
Working memory (WM) capacity impacts long-term memory (LTM) encoding, especially in children. Individual differences in WM predict LTM performance across age groups, highlighting a WM-to-LTM bottleneck.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Working memory (WM) is crucial for cognitive tasks.
- Long-term memory (LTM) retrieval is influenced by various factors.
- Age-related changes impact memory functions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the causal role of working memory capacity in long-term memory retrieval.
- To examine individual and age-related differences in the WM-to-LTM transfer.
- To understand how WM limitations affect LTM performance.
Main Methods:
- 160 participants (120 children, 40 young adults) completed WM and LTM tasks.
- WM task involved recalling unique everyday items at varying set sizes.
- LTM was assessed for items previously held in WM, calculating WM-to-LTM transfer ratios.
Main Results:
- Both WM and LTM improved with age.
- WM capacity differences predicted LTM encoding success.
- The efficiency of transferring information from WM to LTM was consistent across age groups.
Conclusions:
- Long-term memory performance is constrained by working memory limitations.
- Individual and age-related WM capacity significantly influences LTM encoding.
- A bottleneck exists in the transfer of information from working memory to long-term memory.
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