The role of attention in preschoolers' working memory

Recent studies showed that introducing an unfilled delay or a secondary task between encoding and recall reduces recall performance in preschoolers, whereas increasing the attentional demand of this secondary task does not. Based on these results, different authors drew opposing conclusions regarding the use of attention in preschoolers' memory maintenance. This study aimed to bring further evidence to bear on the issue. In two experiments, recall was reduced when an unfilled delay was introduced before recall, but also when the demand of the concurrent task increased. These effects did not interact with age, although performance improved from 4 to 6 years of age. A third experiment ruled out an alternative interpretation. These findings show the role of attention in preschoolers' working memory and raise the question of how motor activity may help memory maintenance. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.