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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 302
Effects of an Embodied Cognition Inspired Strategy to Enhance Working Memory Performance, in 7- and 9-Years Old Children
SymposiumTalk-05
Presented by: Dalia Kerimici
Dalia Kerimici, Christophe Fitamen
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
The embodied-cognition theory proposes that our sensorimotor system influences our cognitive capacities, including memory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Borghi & Cimatti, 2009). Previous research investigated the effects of encoding strategies using mime and their efficacity on recall (Allen, 1995; Tellier, 2005, 2006, 2008; Pishgadam et al., 2010; Dickson & Stephens, 2015; Steffens et al., 2015; Roze et al., 2018). The present study tested whether a learning strategy based on body movements could enhance children’s performance in a working memory task. To test our hypothesis, 7- and 9-years old children completed a complex span task. The task consisted of series of words that were said out loud by an experimenter and had to be immediately recalled by the children, while completing a colour denomination concurrent task. Participants were divided into three conditions; a control group, which was only listening to the words said by the experimenter, an experimental group, that had to listen to the words, see the experimenter mime them, and reproduce the gestures, and finally a comparison group, that had to listen to the words and look at the experimenter’s mimes. The results showed that the use of mimes during the encoding enhanced the overall correct recall, in both 7- and 9-years old children.