The Mid-Career Award

ABSTRACT

Working memory is an extremely influential concept within experimental psychology, with, at the time of writing, over 90 papers with this term in their title published in this journal alone since 2000. One reason for this interest is that measures of working memory tend to be strong correlates of important indices of real-world function. In addition, at first sight working memory appears to be a relatively simple concept to understand. However, despite this apparent simplicity, explaining working memory performance is not straightforward. In this paper I address this challenge, with a particular focus on the development of working memory performance in children; both children developing typically and those experiencing atypical development. I specifically highlight the multiple constraints on working memory performance, and how these constraints inter-relate. I then consider the broader theoretical implications of each of these constraints for current accounts of working memory and its development.

KEYWORDS:

• Development
• Forgetting
• Processing speed
• Rehearsal
• Short-term memory
• Working memory

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Valérie Camos, Steve Majerus, Satoru Saito, and John Towse for their helpful comments on previous versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.