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09:00 - 10:30
Parallel sessions 1
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09:00 - 10:30
Room: HSZ - N1
Chair/s:
Seyma Nur Ertekin, Mathieu Zaugg
Working memory (WM) is central to human cognition, underpinning a wide range of complex cognitive functions. Many daily activities, like reading or following a conversation, depend on it. It is a dynamic system that undergoes substantial changes throughout childhood, and consequently, its interactions with other cognitive systems also evolve. Understanding the effects of WM development is therefore essential for elucidating broader cognitive growth. 
This symposium brings together researchers investigating the development of working memory in childhood through complementary perspectives, ranging from large-scale adaptive data modeling to experimental and eye-tracking approaches.
In this symposium, we will first target the question of how WM capacities develop and to what extent WM is necessary for developing mathematical abilities in primary school children. In the second part, we will focus on proactive functioning, that is, the capacity to anticipate and prepare ourselves for a task. We will discuss when it emerges in WM, how it develops across ages, and how to assess the presence or absence of proactive strategies. Finally, we will discuss the links between the sensorimotor system and WM, by presenting the effect of a body movement-based strategy on WM performance. 
Collectively, these insights will offer a comprehensive and diverse overview, unified by a shared emphasis on the mechanisms and developmental trajectories of working memory in childhood.
Submission 364
Emergence and Development of Proactive Response Planning from Childhood to Adulthood
SymposiumTalk-03
Presented by: Mathieu Zaugg
Mathieu Zaugg 1, Naomi Langerock 1, Dominic Guitard 2, Virginie Mossière 1, David Popescu 1, Evie Vergauwe 1
1 University of Geneva, Switzerland
2 Cardiff University, United Kingdom
Proactivity, the ability to anticipate and prepare for future cognitive demands, has long been assumed to only emerge around age 7 in working memory (e.g., Flavell, 1966; Chevalier et al., 2014; Morey et al., 2018). In the present study, based on the study by Chevalier et al. (2014), we investigated the development of a specific proactive strategy, the planning of sequences of responses. For this purpose, we tested three age groups: younger children (age 4-5), older children (age 9-10) and adults, with a three-variants simple span task. Contrarily to Chevalier et al. (2014) who did not find proactive behavior before age 7, we could demonstrate the presence of the proactive strategy of planning response sequences in the younger children in two out of our three variants, whereas older children and adults showed it in all three variants. Therefore, it seems that children below 7 are capable of planning sequences of responses, but in a less consistent and systematic way than older groups. The implications of these findings, as well as potential reasons for their divergence from earlier results, will be discussed.