The resolution of proactive interference in a novel visual working memory task: A behavioral and pupillometric study.

Proactive interference (PI) occurs when previously learned information impairs memory for more recently learned information. Most PI studies have employed verbal stimuli, while the role of PI in visual working memory (VWM) has had relatively little attention. In the verbal domain, Johansson and colleagues (2018) found that pupil diameter - a real-time neurophysiological index of cognitive effort - reflects the accumulation and resolution of PI.

Can't get it out of my head: Proactive interference in the visual working memory of 3- to 8-year-old children.

Proactive interference (PI) occurs when previously learned memories compete with currently relevant information. Despite extensive literature investigating the effect in adults, little work has been done in young children. In three preregistered studies (N = 38, 35, 172; convenience samples from the Northeastern United States), first, we showed that 3-year-old toddlers are highly sensitive to the effect of PI in visual working memory and second, that these effects can originate from the reactivation of previously encoded information.

The pupil collaboration: A multi-lab, multi-method analysis of goal attribution in infants.

The rise of pupillometry in infant research over the last decade is associated with a variety of methods for data preprocessing and analysis. Although pupil diameter is increasingly recognized as an alternative measure of the popular cumulative looking time approach used in many studies (Jackson & Sirois, 2022), an open question is whether the many approaches used to analyse this variable converge. To this end, we proposed a crowdsourced approach to pupillometry analysis.

The development of peak alpha frequency from infancy to adolescence and its role in visual temporal processing: A meta-analysis.

While it has been shown that alpha frequency increases over development (Stroganova et al., 1999), a precise trajectory has not yet been specified, making it challenging to constrain theories linking alpha rhythms to perceptual development. We conducted a comprehensive review of studies measuring resting-state occipital peak alpha frequency (PAF, the frequency exhibiting maximum power) from birth to 18 years of age.

Proactive interference and the development of working memory.

Working memory (WM), the ability to maintain information in service to a task, is characterized by its limited capacity. Several influential models attribute this limitation in a large extent to proactive interference (PI), the phenomenon that previously encoded, now-irrelevant information competes with relevant information. Here, we look back at the adult PI literature, spanning over 60 years, as well as recent results linking the ability to cope with PI to WM capacity.

Improving the generalizability of infant psychological research: The ManyBabies model.

Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to diversification, and focused on understanding sources of variation.

The role of redundant verbal labels in 8- and 10-month-olds' working memory.

Verbal labels have been shown to help preverbal infants' performance on various cognitive tasks, such as categorization. Redundant labels also aid adults' visual working memory (WM), but it is not known if this linguistic benefit extends to preverbal infants' WM. In two eye-tracking studies, we tested whether 8- and 10-month-old infants' WM performance would improve with the presence of redundant labels in a Delayed Match Retrieval (DMR) paradigm that tested infants' WM for object-location bindings.

Coding of featural information in visual working memory in 2.5-year-old toddlers.

The number of objects that infants can remember in visual working memory (VWM) increases rapidly during the first few years of life (Kaldy & Leslie, 2005; Ross-Sheehy, Oakes, & Luck, 2003). However, less is understood about the of VWM: whether storage is determined by fixed-precision memory slots, or the allocation of a limited continuous resource. In the current study, we adapted the Delayed Match Retrieval eye-tracking paradigm (Kaldy, Guillory, & Blaser, 2016), to test 2.

Putting effort into infant cognition.

Working memory allows for the manipulation of information in support of ongoing tasks, providing a workspace for cognitive processes such as learning, reasoning, and decision making. How well working memory depends, in part, on effort. Someone who pays attention at the right time and place will have better memory, and performance.

Seeing a Page in a Flipbook: Shorter Visual Temporal Integration Windows in 2-Year-Old Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience differences in visual temporal processing, the part of vision responsible for parsing continuous input into discrete objects and events. Here we investigated temporal processing in 2-year-old toddlers diagnosed with ASD and age-matched typically developing (TD) toddlers. We used a visual search task where the visibility of the target was determined by the pace of a display sequence.

Persistence and Accumulation of Visual Memories for Objects in Scenes in 12-Month-Old Infants.

Visual memory for objects has been studied extensively in infants over the past 20 years, however, little is known about how they are formed when objects are embedded in naturalistic scenes. In adults, memory for objects in a scene show information over time as well as despite interruptions (Melcher, 2001, 2006). In the present study, eye-tracking was used to investigate these two processes in 12-month-old infants ( = 19) measuring: (1) whether longer encoding time can improve memory performance (accumulation), and (2) whether multiple shorter exposures to a scene are equivalent to a single exposure of the same total duration (persistence).

Two-year-olds succeed at MIT: Multiple identity tracking in 20- and 25-month-old infants.

Infants' ability to remember objects and their locations emerges during the first year of life. However, not much is known about infants' ability to track objects' identities in a dynamic environment. Here, we tailored the delayed match retrieval eye-tracking paradigm to study infants' ability to track two object identities during occlusion-an infant version of multiple identity tracking (MIT).

Visual temporal integration windows are adult-like in 5- to 7-year-old children.

The visual system must organize dynamic input into useful percepts across time, balancing between stability and sensitivity to change. The temporal integration window (TIW) has been hypothesized to underlie this balance: If two or more stimuli fall within the same TIW, they are integrated into a single percept; those that fall in different windows are segmented (Arnett & Di Lollo, 1979; Wutz, Muschter, van Koningsbruggen, Weisz, & Melcher, 2016). Visual TIWs have been studied in adults, showing average windows of 65 ms (Wutz et al.

Successful attentional set-shifting in 2-year-olds with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The development of executive function is necessary for flexible and voluntary control of behavior. Deficits in executive function are purported to be a primary cause of behavioral inflexibility-a core clinical symptom-in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Attentional set-shifting has traditionally been measured with the Dimensional Change Card Sort, however, this task requires following verbal instructions.

Focused attention predicts visual working memory performance in 13-month-old infants: A pupillometric study.

Attention turns looking, into seeing. Yet, little developmental research has examined the interface of attention and visual working memory (VWM), where what is seen is maintained for use in ongoing visual tasks. Using the task-evoked pupil response - a sensitive, real-time, involuntary measure of focused attention that has been shown to correlate with VWM performance in adults and older children - we examined the relationship between focused attention and VWM in 13-month-olds.

Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder Can Use Language to Update Their Expectations About the World.

This study examined if two-year-olds with ASD can update mental representations on the basis of verbal input. In an eye-tracking study, toddlers with ASD and typically-developing nonverbal age-matched controls were exposed to visual or verbal information about a change in a recently encoded scene, followed by an outcome that was either congruent or incongruent with that information. Findings revealed that both groups looked longer at incongruent outcomes, regardless of information modality, and despite the fact that toddlers with ASD had significantly lower measured verbal abilities than TD toddlers.

Rules infants look by: Testing the assumption of transitivity in visual salience.

What drives infants' attention in complex visual scenes? Early models of infant attention suggested that the degree to which different visual features were detectable determines their attentional priority. Here, we tested this by asking whether two targets - defined by different features, but each equally salient when evaluated independently - would drive attention equally when pitted head-to-head. In Experiment 1, we presented 6-month-old infants with an array of gabor patches in which a target region varied either in color or spatial frequency from the background.

Goal prediction in 2-year-old children with and without autism spectrum disorder: An eye-tracking study.

Unlabelled: This study examined the predictive reasoning abilities of typically developing (TD) infants and 2-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in an eye-tracking paradigm. Participants watched a video of a goal-directed action in which a human actor reached for and grasped one of two objects. At test, the objects switched locations.

Quantifying attentional effects on the fidelity and biases of visual working memory in young children.

Attentional control enables us to direct our limited resources to accomplish goals. The ability to flexibly allocate resources helps to prioritize information and inhibit irrelevant/distracting information. We examined developmental changes in visual working memory (VWM) fidelity in 4- to 7-year-old children and the effects that a distracting non-target object can exert in biasing their memory representations.

Unimpaired attentional disengagement in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

A prominent hypothesis holds that 'sticky' attention early in life in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) limits their ability to explore and learn about the world. Under this hypothesis, the core clinical symptoms of ASD - restricted interests, repetitive behaviors and impaired social/communication abilities - could all result from impaired attentional disengagement during development. However, the existence of disengagement deficits in children with ASD is controversial, and a recent study found no deficit in 5- to 12-year-olds with ASD.

Delayed Match Retrieval: a novel anticipation-based visual working memory paradigm.

We tested 8- and 10-month-old infants' visual working memory (VWM) for object-location bindings - what is where - with a novel paradigm, Delayed Match Retrieval, that measured infants' anticipatory gaze responses (using a Tobii T120 eye tracker). In an inversion of Delayed-Match-to-Sample tasks and with inspiration from the game Memory, in test trials, three face-down virtual 'cards' were presented. Two flipped over sequentially (revealing, e.

Off to a Good Start: The Early Development of the Neural Substrates Underlying Visual Working Memory.

Current neuroscientific models describe the functional neural architecture of visual working memory (VWM) as an interaction of the frontal-parietal control network and more posterior areas in the ventral visual stream (Jonides et al., 2008; D'Esposito and Postle, 2015; Eriksson et al., 2015).

Preschoolers have better long-term memory for rhyming text than adults.

The dominant view of children's memory is that it is slow to develop and is inferior to adults'. Here we pitted 4-year-old children against adults in a test of verbatim recall of verbal material. Parents read a novel rhyming verse (and an integrated word list) as their child's bedtime story on ten consecutive days.