Assessing children's working memory capacity (WMC) can be challenging for a variety of reasons, including the rapid increase in WMC across early childhood. Here, we developed and piloted an adapted WMC task, which involved minimal equipment, could be performed rapidly, and did not rely on verbal production ability (to facilitate the use of the task with younger children). In our adaptation, we portrayed the events of the object-based Missing Scan Task (creatures hiding in and emerging from a house) in a touchscreen format. In the full experiment, 67 participants aged 23 to 90 months achieved the longest set size (LSS) scores that were distributed across the full range of possible scores. A comparison of these scores with those obtained using object-based formats indicated general agreement between the versions of the task. Scores were found to increase with child age. We propose this (freely available) touchscreen adaptation as a suitable WMC task for use with children aged 2 to 7 years.

中文翻译：

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将缺失扫描任务适应触摸屏格式以评估儿童的工作记忆能力

由于多种原因，评估儿童的工作记忆能力 (WMC) 可能具有挑战性，包括 WMC 在儿童早期的快速增长。在这里，我们开发并试用了一项经过调整的 WMC 任务，该任务涉及最少的设备，可以快速执行，并且不依赖于口头表达能力（以方便年幼儿童使用该任务）。在我们的改编中，我们以触摸屏格式描绘了基于对象的缺失扫描任务（隐藏在房屋中和从房屋中出现的生物）的事件。在完整的实验中，67 名 23 至 90 个月的参与者获得了最长的集合大小 (LSS) 分数，这些分数分布在所有可能的分数范围内。将这些分数与使用基于对象的格式获得的分数进行比较表明任务版本之间的总体一致性。发现分数随着儿童年龄的增长而增加。我们建议将此（免费提供）触摸屏改编作为适合 2 至 7 岁儿童使用的 WMC 任务。