Binding and strategic selection in working memory: a lifespan dissociation.

Working memory (WM) shows a gradual increase during childhood, followed by accelerating decline from adulthood to old age. To examine these lifespan differences more closely, we asked 34 children (10 -12 years), 40 younger adults (20 -25 years), and 39 older adults (70 -75 years) to perform a color change detection task. Load levels and encoding durations were varied for displays including targets only (Experiment 1) or targets plus distracters (Experiment 2, investigating a subsample of Experiment 1). WM performance was lower in older adults and children than in younger adults. Longer presentation times were associated with better performance in all age groups, presumably reflecting increasing effects of strategic selection mechanisms on WM performance. Children outperformed older adults when encoding times were short, and distracter effects were larger in children and older adults than in younger adults. We conclude that strategic selection in WM develops more slowly during childhood than basic binding operations, presumably reflecting the delay in maturation of frontal versus medio-temporal brain networks. In old age, both sets of mechanisms decline, reflecting senescent change in both networks. We discuss similarities to episodic memory development and address open questions for future research. Keywords: aging, binding, change detection, cognitive control, development, visual working memory A primary function of visual working memory (WM) is to maintain information of perceptual input from the environment for a short period of time so that the information can be used for goal-directed behavior One paradigm to measure visual WM capacity is the change detection task Lifespan Changes in Components Contributing to Working Memory Performance Models of WM inspired by neuroscientific findings define WM as processes operating on representations in a distributed neural network (