Working memory refers to the small amount of information held in a temporarily heightened state of availability ( Baddeley & Hitch, 1974 Cowan, 2016a), and performance on tasks measuring working memory increases markedly throughout childhood ( Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge, & Wearing, 2004). The findings point to a rich field for continued research. We discuss various mechanisms that could have produced these results, including alternative attention-based mechanisms. It was the modality- or code-specific components of working memory that improved with age and not the central component. The results clearly ruled out that possibility. If A increases with age, so would the dual-task cost, A/2. With development, the ability to hold more information in the focus of attention could lead to an increase in the size of the tradeoff between modalities if attention can hold A items during unimodal-attention trials, then on average attention should hold A/2 of those same items during bimodal-attention trials. In two experiments, we assessed such predictions with children 7–13 years old and adults.

Presentation of two kinds of materials in working memory (visual and acoustic), with the requirement to attend to one or both modalities, poses an interesting case for working memory development because competing predictions can be formulated.

What is acoustic encoding in psychology