Working Memory and Attention in Toddlers (2008)
Undergraduate: Vaishnavi Tallury
Faculty Advisor: Steven Reznick
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience
Memory and attention have been leading areas of interest within cognitive psychology. Very little research has been conducted to study the development of endogenous attention in children. The main goals of the present study were to construct valid and reliable measures to assess working memory and endogenous attention in 3-year-olds, and to explore the relationship between these two cognitive systems. Sixteen toddlers were each assessed twice, for a test-retest procedure. There were two tests of working memory: Animal Houses and Nonsense Word Repetition, and two tests of endogenous attention: Location Change and Feature Change. The Mullen Subscale of Expressive Language and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories were also completed to assess expressive language development. An Observational Report of Child Attention (ORCA) was developed to evaluate aspects of participants’ behavior and attentiveness during the sessions. No significant relationship was found between working memory and attention. However, strong test-retest reliability was evidenced with the Nonsense Word task, Feature Change, and ORCA. Also, working memory and attention were individually correlated with expressive language development. This study contributes to a body of knowledge on memory and attention in child development research.