Abstract
The effects of secondary tasks on verbal and spatial working memory were examined in multiple child, young adult, and older adult samples. Although memory span increased with age in the child samples and decreased with age in the adult samples, there was little evidence of systematic change in the magnitude of interference effects. Surprisingly, individuals who had larger memory spans when there was no secondary task showed greater interference effects than their age-mates. These findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that age and individual differences in working memory are due to differences in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, at least as this hypothesis is currently formulated. Moreover, our results suggest that different mechanisms underlie developmental and individual differences in susceptibility to interference across the life span. A model is proposed in which memory span and processing speed both increase with development but are relatively independent abilities within age groups.
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A preliminary report of parts of this project was presented at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, GA, November 1996. This research was supported by Training Grant AG00030 and Research Grants AG11451 and AG12996. The authors thank Adele Abrahamsen for her valuable comments.
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Jenkins, L., Myerson, J., Hale, S. et al. Individual and developmental differences in working memory across the life span. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 6, 28–40 (1999). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210810
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210810