Longitudinal Evidence That Increases in Processing Speed and Working Memory Enhance Children's Reasoning
Abstract
As children develop, their information-processing speed (PS) increases, and they retain more information in working memory (WM); these changes have been hypothesized to drive age-re-lated improvements in reasoning and problem solving. For example, in Fry and Hale’s (1996) cascade model, develop-mental change in PS increases the functional capacity of WM, which in turn facilitates reasoning. Studies have shown that developmental increases in PS and WM during childhood and adolescence predict developmental improvements in inductive reasoning (Fry & Hale, 1996) and in accuracy on arithmetic word problems (Kail & Hall, 1999). However, although these findings are consistent with the cascade model, they provide relatively weak support because they are based on concurrent correlations derived from cross-sectional studies. The present work was designed to provide a stronger test of the cascade
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The neurocognitive effects show greater maturational effects on speed than on accuracy, consistent with prior studies on age-related performance changes.
“The neurocognitive effects indicate greater maturational effects on speed than accuracy, which is consistent with multiple studies on age-related changes in performance across the lifespan (Kail 2007;Coyle et al. 2011).”
From Imaging Patterns of Brain Development and their Relationship to Cognition (2015) · cites this paper as Kail 2007
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“Trails A is a perceptual-motor task involving visual search and automatic sequencing, comparable to other processing-speed measures known to be associated with developmental changes in working memory (Fry & Hale, 1996; Kail, 2007).”
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- Authors
- Kail, R. V.
- Affiliations
- Purdue University West Lafayette (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kail, Robert V.
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2007-04
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 312-313
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W1971840048
- Cited by
- 194
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 20 · 2015: 14 · 2014: 18 · 2013: 17 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 11.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD046927)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Cognitive Abilities and Testing
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology › Developmental and Educational Neuropsychology
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills
- Keywords
- processing speed, working memory, reasoning, cognitive development, cascade model, inductive reasoning, arithmetic word problems, children, adolescence, longitudinal development
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Child, Cognition, Female, Humans, Male, Memory, Short-Term, Problem Solving, Reaction Time, Time Factors
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