TY  - JOUR
A1  - Galeano Weber, Elena M.
A1  - Dirk, Judith
A1  - Schmiedek, Florian
T1  - Variability in the precision of children’s spatial working memory
T2  - Journal of intelligence
N2  - Cognitive modeling studies in adults have established that visual working memory (WM) capacity depends on the representational precision, as well as its variability from moment to moment. By contrast, visuospatial WM performance in children has been typically indexed by response accuracy—a binary measure that provides less information about precision with which items are stored. Here, we aimed at identifying whether and how children’s WM performance depends on the spatial precision and its variability over time in real-world contexts. Using smartphones, 110 Grade 3 and Grade 4 students performed a spatial WM updating task three times a day in school and at home for four weeks. Measures of spatial precision (i.e., Euclidean distance between presented and reported location) were used for hierarchical modeling to estimate variability of spatial precision across different time scales. Results demonstrated considerable within-person variability in spatial precision across items within trials, from trial to trial and from occasion to occasion within days and from day to day. In particular, item-to-item variability was systematically increased with memory load and lowered with higher grade. Further, children with higher precision variability across items scored lower in measures of fluid intelligence. These findings emphasize the important role of transient changes in spatial precision for the development of WM.
KW  - working memory updating;
KW  - spatial precision
KW  - intra-individual variability
KW  - cognitive development
KW  - micro-longitudinal design
KW  - ambulatory assessment
KW  - hierarchical modeling
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53558
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-535582
SN  - 2079-3200
N1  - This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 6
IS  - 8
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -