Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Developmental and Brain Sciences

First Advisor

Erik Blaser

Second Advisor

Zsuzsa Kaldy

Third Advisor

Marc Pomplun, Elizabeth Bonawitz

Abstract

Working memory refers to the system that temporarily holds information, and the processing that acts upon this information, for an ongoing task (Baddeley, 1992). It is essential to human cognition, from language comprehension to reasoning and planning (Oberauer et al., 2018). It also provides “an interface between perception, long-term memory, and action”(Baddeley, 2003, p. 829). One of the generally accepted features is its limited capacity (Oberauer et al., 2018). Given the central role of working memory in cognition functions, its limited capacity is one of the constraints on these functions (Gruszka & Nęcka, 2017). However, humans have been using physical actions and external resources to help overcome such capacity limitations, or just to minimize cognitive effort (Bocanegra et al., 2019; Clark, 2008; Risko & Gilbert, 2016). Using external resources to support internal functions has a long history, from ancient carved rocks to recent smartphones. Given the close connection between the internal mental processes and the external world, philosophers have proposed the Extended Mind thesis suggesting that the external world is not just supporting the mind, it actually becomes part of the mind (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). In other words, when people are making notes or sketches on paper when they are working, they are not just keeping a record of their thoughts on the paper, they are “thinking on the paper” (Clark, 2008). To be included as part of the mind, external resources need to meet three criteria. They should be: accessible, reliable, and trustworthy (Clark, 2008; Gallagher, 2018). Using the classic example, if the information in a notebook is easily reachable (accessible), available when needed (reliable), and accurate (trustworthy), the notebook (and the information in it) becomes part of the mind. Inspired by the Extended Mind Thesis, in a series of studies (Chapters 1 & 2), I investigated if 5-8-year-old children were sensitive to the accessibility and reliability of external resources from a working memory perspective given its essential role in cognitive function. In Chapter 1, I describe experiments using a novel ‘Shopping Game’ on a tablet to investigate how children trade off their use of external resources and working memory based on the accessibility of the external resource. In the shopping game, children were asked to pick items from a store based on a shopping list, but the shopping list and the store were not visible simultaneously. However, children could toggle between them. I manipulated the “access cost” by varying an annoying, but not overtly aversive, delay (0 s / 4 s) before the list’s reappearance. Across three experiments (N = 141), I found that 5-8-year-old children visited the list more often, spent less time studying the list, and selected fewer correct items when the access cost was low, indicating that children at this age generally rely on external resources, in an attempt to reduce cognitive effort. On the other hand, when access costs were high, children visited the list less often, spent more time studying, and selected more correct items in an attempt to reduce the access cost. In addition, children were sensitive to the accessibility of external resources and chose the low-access cost condition as the easier and preferred one. In Chapter 2, I investigated whether young children are sensitive to the reliability of an external source and adjust their reliance on external resources when reliability is manipulated. Using a modified version of the Shopping Game, I manipulated the impression, but not the actuality, of the reliability of the external resource. The results show that 5-6-year-old children (N = 37) made significantly more trips to the list, spent less time studying it, and picked fewer correct items when they expected the external resources to be reliable. On the other hand, children visited the list less often, spent more time studying it, and picked more correct items. In addition, children were also able to choose the reliable condition as the easier one and preferred one. In short, these results showed that children were sensitive to the reliability of the external source and were able to adjust their strategies accordingly. The above studies with children and previous studies with adults (Ballard et al., 1995; Draschkow et al., 2021; Somai et al., 2020) show that people, especially adults, rely on accessible, reliable external resources to minimize cognitive effort and use a “just-in-time” strategy where they just store the most relevant information in the memory at the point it is required for the task (Ballard et al., 1995; M. Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005). However, this highly controlled and selective strategy can be detrimental to infants' and children’s learning early in life. In fact, studies have shown that infants and children were less selective in their attention and acquired more task-irrelevant information compared to adults in category learning tasks, leading to better learning of the multiple features of a category and less learned inattention (Best et al., 2013; Deng & Sloutsky, 2015, 2016). It seems that this less selective attention and the acquired irrelevant information can contribute to wider exploration that is beneficial to cognitive development and early learning (Plebanek & Sloutsky, 2017). Based on this literature, in Chapter 3, I investigated if infants can use seemingly task-irrelevant, extra information to facilitate their performance in a visual search task using a visual statistical learning paradigm. In this study, 14-to 22-month-old infants (N = 43) searched for a target in snapshots taken from different viewpoints of a panoramic scene of a room. The target either always appeared in the same relative location in a panoramic scene (e.g. always on the bed) or in different relative locations (on the bed, table, etc.). Critically, the target’s absolute location in the snapshots varied due to the change of viewpoints but was matched across conditions. I investigated whether infants would acquire and use task-irrelevant information (the configuration of the non-target objects in each snapshot) to build a panoramic scene to facilitate their search for the target. The results showed that infants located the target significantly faster when it was always in the same relative location in the panoramic scene. These results provide evidence that infants acquire irrelevant information to build panoramic scene representations from snapshots and use it to facilitate their search. Taken together, my work has shown that children are efficient in saving cognitive effort and only memorizing a small amount of the most task-relevant information when the external resources are accessible and reliable. In the meantime, from early in life when they are infants, they will acquire task-irrelevant information implicitly to support their performance. These studies provided a perspective on how these different mental processes can work together to support their learning and adapting to the world.

Comments

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