structural:summarization, information:highlighting, stylistic:style_transfer
Childhood

Measures of performance on tests of working memory increase continuously between early childhood and adolescence, while the structure of correlations between different tests remains largely constant. Starting with work in the Neo-Piagetian tradition, theorists have argued that the growth of working-memory capacity is a major driving force of cognitive development. This hypothesis has received substantial empirical support from studies showing that the capacity of working memory is a strong predictor of cognitive abilities in childhood. Particularly strong evidence for a role of working memory for development comes from a longitudinal study showing that working-memory capacity at one age predicts reasoning ability at a later age. Studies in the Neo-Piagetian tradition have added to this picture by analyzing the complexity of cognitive tasks in terms of the number of items or relations that have to be considered simultaneously for a solution. Across a broad range of tasks, children manage task versions of the same level of complexity at about the same age, consistent with the view that working memory capacity limits the complexity they can handle at a given age. One experiment has correlated that a decrease of complexity regarding capacity limits are articulated from research concerning language processes, outlining the effect on the capacity of children with language disorders, having performed lower than their age-matched peers. A correlation between memory storage deficits can be viewed as a contribution due to these language disorders, or rather the cause of the language disorder, but has not fully suggested a deficit in being able to rehearse information.