The rise and fall of immediate and delayed memory for verbal and visuospatial information from late childhood to late adulthood☆
Highlights
► Individuals differ strongly in verbal versus visuospatial memory performance. ► Individuals can be characterized as having a good verbal or visuospatial memory. ► Visuospatial memory performance shows a clear peak at the age of 16. ► After age 25, visuospatial memory decreases about twice as fast as verbal memory. ► There is an increasing proneness to report false memories with age.
Introduction
When first introduced, theories and models of short-term memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968, Miller, 1956/1994, Peterson and Peterson, 1959) and working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) typically considered these immediate memory stores to have roughly the same capacity from person to person. Miller (1956/1994) noticed that short-term memory seemed to be able to contain about seven ‘chunks’, and Baddeley and Hitch (1974) proposed a phonological loop that can contain about 2 s worth of phonological information. It became clear, however, that there is in fact great variation between individuals and that these differences are predictive of other types of skills and capacities. For example, individual differences in working memory capacity may be highly predictive of reading comprehension (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) and correlate with measures of IQ (Deary, Penke, & Johnson, 2010).
One may argue that short-term memory or working memory relies on temporary activation of long-term memory traces (Murre, Wolters, & Raffone, 2006) and that it is, thus, the ‘gateway’ to long-term memory. Based on this idea, one might conjecture that individuals with an excellent short-term or working memory will also have a good long-term memory. After all, the longer one keeps items in short-term memory, the higher the chances of transference to long-term memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968).
Evidence from brain imaging, however, suggests that the relationship between immediate (short-term or working memory) and delayed (long-term memory) may be more complicated and involves aspects, such as efficiency of encoding, that are not related to capacity issues. Individual differences in visual working memory, for example, could be predicted with EEG/ERPs (Vogel, McCollough, & Machizawa, 2005). This study found that individuals with a high capacity were much more efficient at representing only the relevant items than the low capacity individuals. In fact, low capacity individuals sometimes stored more information in memory than high capacity individuals. There are more factors that may disrupt correlations between immediate and delayed memory. For example, individual differences in neuromodulators, such as acetylcholine and dopamine, could affect long-term memory storage more than immediate memory. So, the question remains whether the connection between immediate and delayed memory is strong enough to find a high correlation between these two systems.
The immediate-versus-delayed dimension may be contrasted with the other major dimension of working memory, namely that of verbal versus visuospatial modality, which form the main ‘slave systems’ in the Baddeley and Hitch Working Memory model (Baddeley, 2003, Baddeley and Hitch, 1974). Several studies have shown that individuals may differ greatly on this dimension (e.g., Alloway et al., 2006, Ardila and Rosselli, 1994, Bopp and Verhaeghen, 2007, Gathercole et al., 2004, Herlitz et al., 1999, Park et al., 2002). In this study, we contrasted the immediate-versus-delayed dimension with verbal-versus-visuospatial dimension, examining whether people have a good memory for either verbal or visual (or spatial) materials and whether they have either a good immediate or a good delayed memory for these materials.
Because it is well known that age, education and gender interact with memory performance, the effects of these demographic variables were investigated as well. We had a particular interest in the effects of age on memory. To examine whether verbal and visuospatial memory and immediate and delayed memory show a similar decrease with age, we designed an online battery with a wide array of tests. Some studies have found a higher rate of decrease with age for the visuospatial tests than for the verbal tests (Bopp and Verhaeghen, 2007, Jenkins et al., 2000, Turcotte et al., 2005), but other studies did not replicate this finding (Park et al., 2002). We wanted to unravel more details of the pattern of decreasing memory performance with age. Recent studies (Lovden, 2003, Schacter et al., 1999) suggested, for example, that older subjects are more prone to false memories. We, therefore, also included tests in the online battery to see whether we could find further evidence for this effect and how it relates to other aspects of memory performance.
Using Internet-based testing allowed us to administer about 100,000 memory tests to a total of about 28,000 Dutch people. These large numbers enabled us to use structural equation modeling to disentangle the effects of age, education, and gender and the other dimensions of interest. Internet-based testing also has clear limitations, though many of these can be circumvented with the correct precautions (Gosling et al., 2004, Reips, 2000, Reips, 2002, Skitka and Sargis, 2006). The most notable limitation for our purposes was that the length of a single test session should be limited to about 20 min. We have found that participants are often well motivated during twenty-odd minutes and make for excellent subjects for research in experimental psychology, but they start to drop out of online experiments after this interval. The twenty-minute window was used to present the participants with a quasi-randomly assigned subsets of the larger test battery, with the option – but not the requirement – to take several subsets on one or different occasions. The study was therefore planned with missing data in mind, assuming that the majority of participants would take only a subset of all tests.
To assert the validity of our approach, the experiment was first conducted in a normal psychological laboratory on a small sample of participants with satisfactory results (not reported here). Other measures were taken as well to ensure validity and reliability, based on our earlier experiences with Internet-based research (e.g., Janssen et al., 2005, Janssen et al., 2006, Janssen et al., 2007, Janssen and Murre, 2008, Janssen et al., 2008, Kristo et al., 2009, Meeter et al., 2005, Meeter et al., 2010). The test battery was promoted nationally (in the Netherlands) as The National Memory Test with coverage in several national newspapers and other media, making additional advertising and rewards or other incentive superfluous.
In this paper, we will thus examine the relative importance of the two dimensions visuospatial versus verbal memory and immediate versus delayed memory in individual differences of memory performance. Our study furthermore investigates the dependence of these dimensions across age, gender, and level of education. Recent research by Johnson, Logie, and Brockmole (2010) also suggests that working memory is not unitary and that its structure changes across the life span, though this study did not contrast the verbal/visual nor an immediate/delayed dimensions directly.
Section snippets
Participants
All participants took part on their own volition via the Internet. They could come into contact with our website in at least four ways: (1) through links on other websites, (2) through search engines, (3) through promotion in traditional media, such as articles in newspapers and magazines, which included our web address, or (4) through word of mouth. At the end of the test, participants could invite relatives, friends, and colleagues by sending them standardized e-mails.
In total, 28,116 Dutch
Results
We first analyzed the results of the tests separately. Table 2 gives the number of participants after we omitted the results of incomplete tests and the results of tests with scores that were below chance. Table 2 also gives the mean scores per test. Three-way ANOVAs were conducted for each test. The F-values of each test for the effects of gender (2 levels), age group (14 levels) and level of education (8 levels) are given in Table 3, with higher-order interactions given in Table 4. These
Discussion
The main result that emerged from our administration of a test battery to more than 28,000 participants via the Internet was a steady decrease of memory performance after the age of 25. The effects of age were different for different types of material. For visuospatial tests, this decrease started at 18 years or even earlier and was twice as fast as the decrease of verbal memory. When expressed in Z-scores, the decrease fitted a straight line with a substantial decrease rate, varying from 2.7%
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We would like to thank Wouter Pasman for his work on creating the software for the test battery. The first, second and fourth authors all benefited from grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO; a PIONIER grant to JM, and grants numbered 446-06-031 to SJ, and 451-05-006 to MM).
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Steve M. J. Janssen is now at the School of Psychology, Flinders University.