Poster #12 - The Predictive Role of A-Not-B Performance in Assessment of Infant Oculomotor Working Memory Abilities

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Working memory (WM), central to later-developing executive function (EF), is available to infants from birth (Slater, 1995). Piaget’s A-not-B task has been used as an early marker of infant WM abilities, as successful performance is a function of delay between hiding and search, and age (Diamond, 2013). Furthermore, A-not-B performance in 10-12 month–olds may be linked to the onset of EF (Diamond, 2013).

Early WMC has been shown to be a better predictor of later academic success than early IQ measures (Alloway & Alloway, 2010). Furthermore, WMC has been shown to be relatively stable throughout development: Individuals exhibiting WM concerns at an early age continued to struggle with WM later on (Rose et al., 2012). WM capacity (WMC) can be quantified as the amount of information successfully retained over a delay to plan, perform a task, or solve a problem. Recent work has investigated the quantification of WMC in infancy 6-12 months of age and showed evidence that a battery of WM tasks may index WMC via an eye-tracker (Sanders & Johnson, 2018; in writing).

Here, we present a cross-sectional study examining links between sensorimotor and oculomotor measures of infant WM abilities in a sample of 51 6-12-month-olds. We compared infants’ performance across: (1) a live version of the A-Not-B task assessed live with an experimenter, (2) an oculomotor version of the A-Not-B task assessed via eye-tracker and (3) an eye-tracking testing battery utilizing gaze-contingent adaptations of (a) delayed response (DR; Gilmore & Johnson, 1995), (b) change-detection (CD; Ross-Sheehy et al., 2003) and (c) delayed match retrieval (DMR; Kaldy, 2015) tasks, as in Sanders and Johnson (2018) (see Figure 1). In addition, a range of delay durations (500-1250ms) were introduced within each task to also manipulate levels of cognitive load. Performance on the A-Not-B task was coded in two ways: (1) motor reaching responses to the correct location and (2) looking gaze responses to the correct location.

Overall, results suggest that infants’ sensorimotor performance on live A-Not-B does not predict oculomotor WM performance on the ET battery for infants 6-12-months-old (p<0.05). However, successful A-not-B performance coded for looking, instead of reaching, predicted higher success across all ET tasks and delays (p<0.05) (see Figure 2). Specifically, across all tasks and for longer delays, infants who passed live A-not-B via looking significantly outperformed their same-aged peers who failed (p<0.05)

In addition, investigation of individual differences across tasks, delays, modalities will be discussed. The outcomes of this study help inform future work aiming to better understand and quantify infant WM and how it matures throughout early development.

Authors

• Andrew Sanders, UCLA
  Presenting Author

• Scott Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
  Non-Presenting Author