Working memory is the system responsible for the temporary maintenance and processing of information involved in most cognitive activities, and its study is essential to the understanding of cognitive development. Working Memory in Development provides an integrative and thorough account of how working memory develops and how this development underpins childhood cognitive development. Tracing back theories of cognitive development from Piaget's most influential theory to neo-Piagetian approaches and theories pertaining to the information-processing tradition, Camos and Barrouillet show in Part I how the conception of a working memory became critical to understanding cognitive development. Part II provides an overview of the main approaches to working memory and reviews how working memory itself develops across infancy and childhood. In the final Part III, the authors explain their own theory, the Time-Based Resource-Sharing (TBRS) model, and discuss how this accounts for the development of working memory as well providing an adequate frame to understanding the role of working memory in cognitive development. Working Memory in Development effectively addresses central and debated questions related to working memory and is essential reading for students and researchers in developmental, cognitive, and educational psychology.

Using the highly influential working memory framework as a guide, this textbook provides a clear comparison of the memory development of typically developing children with that of atypical children. The emphasis on explaining methodology throughout the book gives students a real understanding about the way experiments are carried out and how to critically evaluate experimental research. The first half of the book describes the working memory model and goes on to consider working memory development in typically developing children. The second half of the book considers working memory development in several different types of atypical populations who have intellectual disabilities and/or developmental disorders. In addition, the book considers how having a developmental disorder and/or intellectual disabilities may have separate or combined effects on the development of working memory. The Development of Working Memory in Children is for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in development/child psychology, cognitive development and developmental disorders.

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Behavioral Development brings together research on the development of working memory that arises within two quite different approaches.

The Development of Memory in Infancy and Childhood provides a thorough update and expansion of the previous edition and offers new research on significant themes and ideas that have emerged in the past decade such as the cognitive neuroscience of memory development, autobiographical memory and infantile amnesia, and the cognitive and social factors that underlie memory for events. In this volume, Courage and Cowan bring together leading international experts to review the current state of the science of memory development in their own research areas. They note questions of theory and basic science addressed in their research, highlight the real-world applications of those findings, and propose an agenda for future research. The book also considers the implications of their work for the development of atypical children, specifically, how these new findings might be adapted to enrich the lives of those children and to inform and validate our current expectations of individual differences in the development of typical children. The first of three groups of chapters focuses on basic neurobiological, perceptual, and cognitive processes that underlie memory and its development (i.e., encoding, consolidation and storage, retrieval). The second group focuses primarily on the social, contextual, and cultural factors that enable, shape, and mediate these basic processes, while the rest of the chapters focus on practical applications of this knowledge to real-world settings and issues. The book provides a new look at memory development, including new topics such as spatial representation and spatial working, prospective memory, false memories, and memory and culture. This classic yet contemporary volume will appeal to senior undergraduate and graduate students of developmental and cognitive psychology, as well as to developmental psychologists who want a compendium of key topics in memory development.

Based on decades of established research findings in cognitive and developmental psychology, this volume explores and integrates the leading scientific advances into infancy and brain-memory linkages as well as autobiographical and strategic memory. In addition, given that the predominantly classic research on memory development has recently been complemented by more cutting-edge applied research (e.g., eyewitness memory, memory development in educational contexts) in recent years, this volume also provides in-depth and up-to-date coverage of these emerging areas of study.

Communication is vital for social participation. However, communication often takes place under suboptimal conditions. This makes communication harder and less reliable, leading at worst to social isolation. In order to promote participation, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms underlying communication in different situations. Human communication is often speech based, either oral or written, but may also involve gesture, either accompanying speech or in the form of sign language. For communication to be achieved, a signal generated by one person has to be perceived by another person, attended to, comprehended and responded to. This process may be hindered by adverse conditions including factors that may be internal to the sender (e.g. incomplete or idiosyncratic language production), occur during transmission (e.g. background noise or signal processing) or be internal to the receiver (e.g. poor grasp of the language or sensory impairment). The extent to which these factors interact to generate adverse conditions may differ across the lifespan. Recent work has shown that successful speech communication under adverse conditions is associated with good cognitive capacity including efficient working memory and executive abilities such as updating and inhibition. Further, frontoparietal networks associated with working memory and executive function have been shown to be activated to a greater degree when it is harder to achieve speech comprehension. To date, less work has focused on sign language communication under adverse conditions or the role of gestures accompanying speech communication under adverse conditions. It has been proposed that the role of working memory in communication under such conditions is to keep fragments of an incomplete signal in mind, updating them as appropriate and inhibiting irrelevant information, until an adequate match can be achieved with lexical and semantic representations held in long term memory. Recent models of working memory highlight an episodic buffer whose role is the multimodal integration of information from the senses and long term memory. It is likely that the episodic buffer plays a key role in communication under adverse conditions. The aim of this research topic is to draw together multiple perspectives on communication under adverse conditions including empirical and theoretical approaches. This will facilitate a scientific exchange among individual scientists and groups studying different aspects of communication under adverse conditions and/or the role of cognition in communication. As such, this topic belongs firmly within the field of Cognitive Hearing Science. Exchange of ideas among scientists with different perspectives on these issues will allow researchers to identify and highlight the way in which different internal and external factors interact to make communication in different modalities more or less successful across the lifespan. Such exchange is the forerunner of broader dissemination of results which ultimately, may make it possible to take measures to reduce adverse conditions, thus facilitating communication. Such measures might be implemented in relation to the built environment, the design of hearing aids and public awareness.

This book presents a unique attempt to address issues of working memory by establishing a dialogue between neo-Piagetian theorists and researchers specialized in typical and atypical working memory development.

In this volume, two scholars with different but complementary interests in memory and cognitive development present a careful overview of the field of memory development from the perspective of their theory of good strategy use. In addition to treating broad topics of general interest, such as knowledge, cognitive capacity, and metamemory, the text also examines controversial issues surrounding the development of children's memory--particularly eyewitness memory. The result is a coherent statement about memory development accompanied by commentary on the study of memory development, plus applications of the theory and research in the area. This book is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and other professionals interested in child and adolescent memory.

Working memory is the ability to hold in mind information that has been previously processed, while processing and assimilating incoming information. This volume attempts to offer an integrative yet comprehensive approach to working memory by focusing on detailed comparisons of major theoretical proposals about working memory variation.