Relationships between Verbal and Visuospatial Working Memories and Source Monitoring among Young Children

Abstract

The results of previous studies examining the relationship between source monitoring and working memory in young children are not consistent. One of the reasons for this inconsistency is concerning the modalities of information with which working memory tasks deal. The present study investigated how young children’s verbal and visuospatial working memory capacity would be related to respective source-monitoring tasks with visually or verbally presented stimuli. Children aged four (n = 21) and five years (n = 21) participated in this study. They completed two verbal working memory tasks, namely, the backward digit span and listening span tests; and two visuospatial working memory tasks, namely, a comparative line test and a rotated figure test. In the source-monitoring task, first, an adult man and an adult woman read two different picture books to groups of children. Subsequently, they read short sentences aloud and showed pictures to the children. Each child then performed recognition tests for the sentences and the pictures, and required to decide on the appropriate source. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed the following results: The verbal working memory task (i.e., the backward digit span) was a significant factor explaining performance on the verbal source-monitoring task, whereas the visuospatial working memory task (i.e., a rotated figure test) explained the performance on the visual source-monitoring task.