The role of attention in the development of short-term memory: Age differences in the verbal span of apprehension

In previous studies of memory span, participants have attended to the stimu li while they were presented, and therefore have had the opportunity to use a variety of mnemonic strategies. In the main portion of the present study , participants (first- and fourth-grade children, and adults; 24 per age gr oup) carried out a visual task while hearing lists of spoken digits and rec eived a post-list digit recall cue only occasionally, for some lists. Under these conditions, list information presumably must be extracted from a pas sively held store such as auditory sensory memory. The results suggest that each individual has a core memory capacity limit that can be observed clea rly in circumstances in which it cannot be supplemented by mnemonic strateg ies, and that the capacity limit appears to increase with age during childh ood. Other, attention-demanding processes also contribute to memory for att ended lists.