Binding Memory in Children and Adults: Assessing Suffix Plausibility and Spatial Overlay Effects

Visual working memory (VWM) capacity increases from childhood to adulthood. Yet, it is not clear which factors drive memory development. Here, we assessed developmental changes in the ability to form location-shape-color bindings, susceptibility to interference from irrelevant stimuli (suffix effect), and the role of location as a mediator of feature-feature associations. Children (3rd, 4th, and 5th grade) and undergraduate students performed a cued-recall task with two cue types (shape vs. location) and five interference conditions (baseline and four conditions with suffixes, manipulating both suffix plausibility and spatial overlay). Children recalled fewer information than undergraduate students, particularly when the task involved a location cue. Regardless of cue type and across all age ranges, plausible suffixes reduced recall more than implausible suffixes (plausibility effect). This result is consistent with models that propose a perceptual filter preferentially gating encoding of relevant (plausible) features to VWM, or models that explain suffix effects due to similarity-based interference. Spatial overlay effects were less consistent, but were more probable for recall of color than shape information. These results are inconsistent with the view that location is an obligatory part of the representation of an object, aligning more with views that propose multiple paths to retrieve information from VWM. Overall, suffix conditions and age group did not interact. These results suggest that increases in VWM capacity cannot be explained by the efficiency of an attentional control mechanism to gate information or to flexibly access bindings in VWM.