Poster #3 - Auditory Working Memory for Nonlinguistic Sounds at 8 Months

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Working memory is a limited-capacity memory system that temporarily stores visual and auditory information that can be used to support ongoing cognitive tasks. Historically, working memory tasks have required participants to follow instructions and actively engage in the task. Such tasks work well for adults and children, but they are not suitable to test working memory in infancy. As a result, knowledge regarding working memory in infancy has been relatively limited. However, over the last two decades, new methods have allowed researchers to begin studying working memory in infancy. Most infant working memory studies have focused on visual working memory rather than auditory working memory (Oakes et al., 2006, 2011, 2013; Ross-Sheehy et al., 2003, 2011); consequently, very little is known about the development of auditory working memory in early infancy (but see Ross-Sheehy & Newman, 2015). The current study seeks to investigate infants’ auditory working memory abilities at 8 months. Participants will be 24 full-term infants with no history of developmental, vision, or hearing impairments. Infants’ auditory working memory will be tested using a head-turn preference procedure and a modified version of an auditory change detection task used successfully by Ross-Sheehy & Newman (2015). During the task, half of the streams will be constructed of 2 instrument sequences, while the other half will be constructed of 3 instrument sequences. Additionally, half of the streams are constant streams, which means the same 2 or 3 instrument sequences are repeated over the 20 s stream. The other half of the streams are varying streams, meaning that one instrument within each new sequence presentation changes. We expect infants to look longer at varying streams than constant streams, dependent upon their working memory capacity for auditory information. If infants have a working memory capacity of 3, we expect them to look longer to 3-instrument varying streams than 3-instrument constant streams. If they have a working memory capacity of 2, we expect that they will look longer to 2-instrument varying streams than 2-instrument constant streams, but show similar looking to constant and varying 3-instrument streams. If they have a working memory capacity of less than 2, we expect no difference in looking toward constant versus varying streams. A varying sequence preference score will be calculated for each infant based on their looking times to varying versus constant streams. A mixed 2 x 2 repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) will be used to examine the effect of sequence length and sequence type on looking times. Follow-up planned comparisons will be conducted using 2-tailed t-tests to see if infants look longer on varying versus constant streams for each sequence length. The findings from this study will help shed light on the development of auditory working memory, which may have significant implications for theories of learning and language acquisition in infancy. The preregistration for this project can be found at https://osf.io/djvtm/?view_only=59deb22b03c24f24b4548036db2d80cf.

Authors

• McKenzie Mullins Sheets, University of Tennessee - Knoxville
  Presenting Author

• Daniela Santos Oliveira, University of Tennessee - Knoxville

• Shannon Ross-Sheehy, University of Tennessee - Knoxville

• Jessica Hay, University of Tennessee, Knoxville