Filling the Gaps: How Attentional States Influence Memory Formation in Children and Adults

• Main Author: Decker, Alexandra
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2022
• Subjects: Cognitive psychology; Developmental psychology; Psychology
• ISBN: 9798357543394

To understand the complex world around them, children critically depend on the ability to form memories. But in many moments, children struggle to form memories and often remember qualitatively different (and less goal-relevant) information than adults. Although these findings could reflect immature memory processes, another possibility is that worse memory in childhood reflects the slow development of attention. In adults, successful memory depends on the ability to endogenously sustain and selectively attend to task relevant content–abilities that are immature in childhood. In this dissertation I report 4 experiments that explore the relationship between attention and memory formation in children and adults. In Chapter 2, I describe a study examining how endogenous fluctuations in attention influence the ability to form memories in each moment. I find that endogenous fluctuations in attention closely correlate with the ability to form memories in children and adults, but covary with memory formation more closely in children. In Chapter 3, I turn to exploring how reactive shifts in attention, elicited by errors, shape memory formation in adults. I find that making an error increases arousal and captures attention leading to immediate memory decrements. Finally, in Chapter 4, I ask why children tend to be more likely to remember goal-irrelevant information than adults. I find that children have reduced memory for target information but enhanced memory for goal-irrelevant information relative to adults. Moreover, lower memory selectivity is closely related to poorer performance on an attentionally demanding task which mediates age-differences in memory selectivity. Overall, I argue that these data illustrate that the slow development of attention (rather than memory per se) may in large part explain age differences in memory performance after middle childhood.