Children’s working memory develops at similar rates for sequences differing in compressibility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Determining the causes of working memory maturation is a global issue in developmental cognitive psychology. The question has most often been addressed by manipulating stimulus types within participants. In the present experiment, we instead addressed this question by examining development in children’s working memory using a single stimulus type. Primary school children aged 6 to 10 years (total N = 256) participated in a task inspired by the game Simon®. Children saw sequences of colored squares presented one-at-a-time, and then attempted to reproduce the sequences in the correct order. Some sequences were simple and contained regularities that made them compressible, while other sequences were more complex and less compressible. We found that children’s memory for both kinds of sequences improved with age. However the ratio between children’s memory for simple and complex sequences did not substantially change with age. These findings suggest that storage capacity of working memory increases in middle childhood, but that children’s ability to optimize storage by compressing sequences remains stable across this age range.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".