Variability in 5- and 8-year-olds' memory for duration: an interfering task in temporal bisection

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate 5- and 8-year-olds' long- term memory for stimulus duration in a bisection task. Children were traine d to discriminate between a short and a long standard duration presented as visual stimulus for 2 and 8 s, respectively. They had then to decide wheth er an intermediate stimulus duration was more similar to the short or to th e long standard in two identical testing phases separated by air interferin g task lasting for 15 min (immediate test vs. deferred test). The results s howed that the 5- and the 8-year-olds produced orderly psychophysical funct ions. However, the 8-year-olds produced psychophysical functions. which inc reased more abruptly with the increasing stimulus duration. Nevertheless, w hatever the age of children tested, the psychophysical function curves were flatter in the deferred test than in the immediate test, and more particul arly in the 5-year-olds. Furthermore, the 5-year-olds produced fewer 'long' responses in the deferred than in the immediate test. Modeling of the data suggests that the variability of the representation of the standard in lon g-term memory was higher in the 5-than in the 8-year-olds and that the inte rfering task increased this memory variability. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B .V. All rights reserved.