14 DAY TRIAL // Preserving information in the working memory is difficult if verbal distractions appear. They seem to be one of the main causes of poor memory, as people need to rehearse and renew their thoughts in order to not forget, scientific tests conducted by psychologists at the University of Bristol show.
Memory-related tests were made on 117 six-year-old and 104 eight-year-old children, in an attempt to understand the process of forgetting and memorizing information. The results show that storing information inside the working memory is a process that begins relatively early in life. These results, published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, might be crucial for the progress of the educational development, a working memory is what allows people to accomplish problem solving and maths every day.
The same series of questions were presented to both age groups. They had to remember sets of words and some of the tests needed a delayed response. In some cases, children had to wait before repeating the words and a verbal or a nonverbal distraction interfered during the delay time. All these elements allowed researchers to find out how they affect children's memory.
Observations showed that any kind of distraction altered children's memory, and suggested that without an additional task, they would repeat the original information during the delay. Furthermore, verbal distraction was considered to be the most damaging for recall, as it prevented children from verbally repeating the original information to themselves.
“Our results confirm that we forget information from memory because we are distracted by other activities, but they also show that it is the type and not the amount of that distraction that really determines how much we forget,” said professor Chris Jarrold, research leader and an expert in cognitive development from the University of Bristol’s Department of Experimental Psychology.
“Instead, when we are trying to remember verbal information such as a list of names or numbers, verbal distraction leads to greater forgetting than non-verbal distraction. This is the case even when different distraction tasks require an equal amount of time as the original task in hand. This suggests that one way in which we try to remember information is by verbally rehearsing it, and the findings from our studies with children show that the ability to rehearse in this way develops considerably between the ages of six and eight.”
Professor Jarrold received a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for conducting this research. It will also allow him to further investigate this matter by determining the link between memory skills and academic abilities in children.