The determinants of working memory: past proposals and new findings

Working memory is the limited-capacity cognitive system in charge of maintaining information in the short-term. A number of promising explanations have been proposed to justify the drastic increase in working memory performance throughout childhood, such as a pure increase in storage capacity, or the strategic use of maintenance mechanisms. However, one may wonder whether these determinants are still of interest. This symposium aims at highlighting the most recent work of five different developmental labs and their most recent findings on working memory development. The symposium will shed light on the role of attentional control and goal maintenance in children's working memory development, and will show the latest findings about the development of interrogative susceptibility in relation to working memory, the spontaneous use of attentional refreshing, and the developmental trajectories of memory for multi-feature objects.