Poster #6 - Young Children’s Cost-dependent Tradeoff Between Looking and Remembering

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

Adults tend to minimize using working memory, which is perceived as effortful, preferring to exploit the external world to provide necessary information - unless the ‘cost’ to access those external sources is high (Ballard et al., 1995; Draschkow et al., 2021). A recent study (Kenderla & Kibbe, 2022) found that 8- to 10-year-olds, like adults, trade off using working memory versus an external source when searching for hidden objects, depending on the cost of accessing the external source and the difficulty of the task. Other work has demonstrated that 5- to 7-year-olds are starting to become able to spontaneously monitor the cognitive demands of tasks (Niebaum & Munakata, 2020) and can use strategies to offload information to the external world (e.g. putting stickers on a target’s location for later reference) (Bulley et al., 2020). This suggests that these younger children might also show a tradeoff between memorizing and exploiting external sources. Here, in this preregistered study (https://osf.io/9qrc8) with a group of 5- to 8-year-olds, we investigated this tradeoff, using a novel paradigm that allowed us to separate effort, performance, and response bias.

We developed a novel ‘Shopping Game’ for a touchscreen tablet where children were asked to pick several items from the shelves of a store that were on their shopping list. The shelves and the list were not visible on the screen simultaneously, instead, participants had to toggle between them by pressing a central ‘switch’ icon. We manipulated the cost of accessing the list by varying the time delay between pressing the switch icon and the actual (re-)appearance of the shopping list. There were two conditions, a no-delay condition (0 s) and a long-delay condition (4 s). We recorded the number of times participants looked back at the list (trips), the time spent on the list during each trip (dwell time), participants’ sensitivity (d’), and response bias (C).

34 children (22 girls, M = 6.98 years, range = 5.09–8.97 years) were included in the final analysis. Children overall had longer dwell time (5.86 s vs. 4.57 s, F = 20.12, p < 0.001), made significantly fewer trips (3.51 vs. 4.07, F = 15.69, p < 0.001 , higher d’ (1.17 vs. 1.08, F = 7.32, p < 0.01), and lower C (indicative of a more liberal responding bias; 1.14 vs. 1.19, F = 20.12, p < 0.001) in the long-delay condition. In addition, we found significant age and condition interaction effects for dwell time (F = 16.61, p < 0.001), the number of trips (F = 5.28, p < 0.05), and d’ (F = 6.64, p < 0.05), but not C (F = 0.88, p = 0.35). These results indicate that children at this age tend to minimize effort by relying on external sources - but when the cost to access external information is high, older children especially will increase their use of working memory.

Authors

• Yibiao Liang, University of Massachusetts Boston
  Presenting Author

• Zsuzsa Kaldy, University of Massachusetts Boston

• Erik Blaser, University of Massachusetts Boston