Young Children Monitor the Fidelity of Visual Working Memory

The ability to concurrently maintain representations of multiple objects and their locations in visual working memory is severely limited. Thus, making optimal use of visual working memory requires continual, moment-to-moment monitoring of its fidelity: High-fidelity representations can be relied upon, whereas incomplete or fuzzy representations must be refreshed or ignored. Previous work showed that adults track the fidelity of their visual working memory. Here, we asked whether children, whose capacities for visual working memory are undergoing protracted development, also can do so. We showed 5- and 6-year-olds sets of 2-5 single-feature (Experiment 1) or multifeature (Experiment 2) objects hidden simultaneously in separate locations. We asked children to recall the location of one of the objects, then bet 0-3 resources on whether they were correct. In both experiments, we found that children's confidence in their visual working memory, as indexed by their bets, was correlated with their accuracy on each trial, controlling for task difficulty: Children bet higher when they were correct and lower when they were incorrect. Our results suggest that metacognitive awareness of the representational limits of visual working memory may emerge before working memory reaches stable capacity.

Automated summary

The study found that children are able to self-monitor the accuracy of their visual working memory, as evidenced by their confidence levels reflected in their betting behavior, and this metacognitive awareness may emerge before working memory reaches stable capacity.