Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Working memory (WM), central to later-developing executive function, is available to infants from birth. The presentstudy examined individual- and age-related differences in infant WMC utilizing a range of methodologies to quantifyWM in a sample of 70 6-12-month-olds. We compared performance across a battery of WM tasks varying in levels ofcognitive load. A range of delay durations were introduced within each task to determine maximum delays that infantsmay successfully tolerate and still yield above-chance performance. Overall results suggest WM abilities may be readilyassessed as early as 6-months. As task difficulty increased, age-related improvements in WM performance increasedaccordingly. Additionally, average performance across tasks and delays significantly increased from 34% at 6-months to46% at 12-months. Investigation of individual differences across tasks, delays and modalities will be discussed. Outcomesof this study help to better understand and quantify infant WM and how it matures throughout early development.