Do School-Aged Children Spontaneously Use Refreshing as Maintenance Strategy in Working Memory? Testing the Effects of Free Time and Motivation

Working memory is the system responsible for maintaining information that is no longer available. Given the long-term impact of working memory in people's lives, it is fundamental to understand which mechanisms underlie it and how these develop with age. A recently proposed mechanism to explain working memory development is attentional refreshing. Refreshing is an attention-based maintenance mechanism that improves the accessibility of mental representations. It is assumed to operate serially, with attention cycling from one mental representation to the other, in order to reactivate all to-be-maintained items. Although it has been suggested that its efficiency increases in children between 7 and 14 years old, recent results contradict this notion. In this article, we modify several important task characteristics of a recently developed paradigm used to detect whether refreshing is spontaneously used in children and to examine whether evidence for spontaneous refreshing could be found. All participants were recruited in public schools in Geneva (Switzerland). In Experiment 1 (68 8-year-olds, 32 girls and 36 boys, and 62 12-year-olds, 35 girls and 27 boys) and Experiment 2 (26 8-year-olds, 11 girls and 15 boys, and 49 12-year-olds, 27 girls and 22 boys), we show that increasing children's motivation and providing more explicitly free time do not result in the spontaneous occurrence of refreshing in 8- and 12-year-olds. The absence of evidence for refreshing in a simple, commonly-used working memory task, despite theory-driven modifications aimed at encouraging it, casts some doubts on the notion that refreshing is crucially involved in children's working memory functioning and development.