Effects Of Pointing Movements On Children’s Visual Spatial Working Memory

Visual spatial working memory is the ability of the human brain to temporarily maintain and manipulate visual spatial information and plays a crucial role in everyday cognitive tasks.Visual spatial working memory is also an important part of children’s executive functions,and it is closely related to children’s academic performance.Given the tight relationship between the spatial component of visual spatial working memory and motion,lots of previous studies have explored the effects of movement,especially hand movement,on visual spatial working memory.Although many studies have demonstrated that pointing movements in the encoding phase contributes to improving performance in visual spatial working memory,the cognitive processing mechanisms involved remain controversial.Moreover,the subject group of previous studies mainly focused on adults,which less dynamically examined the role of pointing movement on visual spatial working memory from the perspective of development.After all,previous studies showed that pointing movement is of great significance for children’s cognitive development,and children’s ability of visual spatial working memory increases with age.Therefore,this study using the e Corsi task as the main paradigm to explore the role of pointing movement work in the development of visual spatial working memory in children.Experiment 1 investigates the influence of pointing movement on the development of children’s visual spatial working memory span.Children in the first,third and fifth grades of elementary school were recruited as subjects.All subjects had to complete the standard e Corsi task under three stimulus coding methods(no pointing movement,passive pointing movement,active pointing movement).For the e Corsi task,the recall methods include forward recall and backward recall,and the maximum memory span of the subjects under each condition is recorded.The results showed that:(1)Compared with no pointing movement and passive pointing movement,active pointing movement improved children’s visual spatial working memory span.(2)The span of visual spatial working memory increases significantly with the increase of grades,but the promotion effect of active pointing movement on the span of visual spatial working memory decreases with the rise of grades.There is improved effect for the grade 1 and a rising trend in grade 3,but no promoting effect for the grade 5.(3)The forward recall is better than the backward recall,and the promotion effect of active pointing movement is reflected in the backward recall.Experiment 2 further explored the influence of pointing movement on the visual spatial memory total performance and item memory performance of children of different grades under the condition of equal span.Children in grades 1,3,and 5 need to complete the equal-span e Corsi task based on the average length of each age group,and record the visual spatial total accuracy and item accuracy of the subjects under different pointing movement conditions and recall sequences.The results showed that:(1)Compared with no pointing movement and passive pointing movement,active pointing movement improved the item accuracy of children in grade 1 and grade 3.(2)Passive pointing movement and active pointing movement can improve the total accuracy of children in the grades1 and 3,but have no significant effect on the children in the grade 5.(3)The total accuracy of boys is significantly higher than girls,but there is no significant difference in the correct rate of item accuracy.Both active pointing movement and passive pointing movement have improved the accuracy of girls’ item accuracy,but they have no significant effect on boys.In order to find out whether the promotion of fifth-grade children’s visual spatial working memory performance by pointing movements is related to task difficulty,experiment 3 manipulated the task difficulty variable,and compared the active pointing movement and passive pointing movement tasks under two different sequence lengths.The results showed that: in the case of low difficulty,neither active pointing movement nor passive pointing movement had a effect on visual spatial working memory;in the case of high difficulty,due to the change of attention resources,passive pointing movement promoted item accuracy,while active pointing movement did not play a role in promoting it.Taken together,this study demonstrates that the facilitation effect of active pointing movement on children’s visual spatial working memory declines with age.The facilitation effect of passive pointing movement is only reflected in the accuracy of young children and high difficulty tasks.Boys have higher visual spatial ability than girls,and pointing movement work has a greater effect on promoting girls’ visual spatial working memory.Both of active pointing movement and passive pointing movement had a greater promotion on young children.