We explored the causal role of individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity in long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Our sample of 160 participants included 120 children (6–13-years old) and 40 young adults (18–24 years). Participants performed a WM task with images of unique everyday items, presented at varying set sizes. Subsequently, we tested participants' LTM for items from the WM task. Using these measures, we estimated the ratio at which items successfully held in WM were recognized in LTM. While WM and LTM generally improved with age, the ability to transfer information from WM to LTM appeared consistent between age groups. Moreover, individual differences in WM capacity appeared to predict LTM encoding. Overall, these results suggested that LTM performance was constrained by experimental, individual, and age-related WM limitations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this WM-to-LTM bottleneck.

中文翻译：

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儿童的长期记忆力直接受到工作记忆容量限制的限制

我们探讨了长期记忆 (LTM) 检索中工作记忆 (WM) 容量中个体和年龄相关差异的因果作用。我们的 160 名参与者样本包括 120 名儿童（6-13 岁）和 40 名年轻人（18-24 岁）。参与者使用不同尺寸的独特日常物品图像执行 WM 任务。随后，我们针对 WM 任务中的项目测试了参与者的 LTM。使用这些措施，我们估计了在 WM 中成功持有的项目在 LTM 中得到认可的比率。虽然 WM 和 LTM 通常会随着年龄的增长而提高，但转移能力从 WM 到 LTM 的信息在年龄组之间似乎是一致的。此外，WM 容量的个体差异似乎可以预测 LTM 编码。总体而言，这些结果表明 LTM 性能受到实验、个体和与年龄相关的 WM 限制的限制。我们讨论了这种 WM 到 LTM 瓶颈的理论和实践意义。