亚洲AV

4-VA supports childhood working memory research collaboration

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As an undergraduate, Sabine Doebel became fascinated by children鈥檚 thinking and how it changes with age. Now, as an assistant professor in the at 亚洲AV, she spends much of her time in the Developing Minds Lab designing studies to understand how young children learn to think.

Sabine Doebel
Photo provided

Although these executive function skills are vital to children鈥檚 success in school and beyond, much remains unknown about their development. Particularly important for academic success is working memory鈥攖he capacity to maintain and manipulate information in mind, such as words, numbers, and other symbols. Working memory is often measured using tests including the Backward Digit Span, in which children repeat increasingly long sequences of digits in backwards order.

鈥淚 have always been interested in how experience may shape working memory skills,鈥 said Doebel. She was particularly curious about how early learning experiences at home鈥 specifically in the domains of literacy and numeracy鈥攃ould foster growth in working memory span.

With the support of a 4-VA award, Doebel had the opportunity to share this new project idea with her colleague and mentor Angeline Lillard, a widely respected developmental psychologist and researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia (UVA).

鈥淥ur collaboration would not have taken off the way it did if it hadn鈥檛 been for Angeline, because she was the one who sent me an email about 4-VA,鈥 said Doebel. 鈥淪he said, 鈥楬ave you heard of 4-VA? We should consider this option.鈥欌

The core purpose of 4-VA is to improve efficiencies in higher education and research and promote collaborations among the Virginia public universities. So Doebel鈥檚 project, How Does Experience Support Working Memory Development?, was a perfect fit. 听

Doebel鈥檚 lab recruited and tested more than 100 children on four different variations of the backward span tasks. Parents also completed a detailed survey reporting frequency and variety in various home learning practices. At UVA, Lillard leveraged her own participant pool and school connections to recruit an additional sample of conventionally schooled and Montessori-educated children.

Doctoral student working with child
Doctoral student Nicole Stucke working with a student in the lab. Photo provided

Doebel enlisted George Mason students Jordan Hassani, BA Psychology 鈥23, 听and Nicole Stucke, PhD Psychology 鈥24, to collect the data. Hassani created the survey, tested the children, and coded the data. Stucke, who has functioned as the Developing Minds Lab manager, helped with testing. Other team members, including George Mason undergraduate Scarlett Bird-Guerra, BS Psychology 鈥23, were involved in community-based recruitment efforts.

UVA undergraduate Maksud Juraev and graduate student Abigail Kissinger led the UVA data collection efforts.

The team noted that the results were both as predicted and surprising. As expected, they found that children show larger backward spans for items that are relatively familiar鈥攆or example, performance on trials that involved the digits 1, 2, 3 was better than on trials involving 7, 8, 9.

However, while Doebel expected that children who engaged in more numeracy practices at home might show better performance on a backward span task involving digits, support was not found for this hypothesis. Instead, it was observed that children鈥檚 backward digit span was related to home literacy practices, and that this was true even after accounting for other home learning practices and age.

Doebel presented the findings at meetings of the American Psychological Association and at the Society for Research on Child Development. She and Lillard are also preparing manuscripts for publication in academic journals in the field.

Next up for the team is to dive deeper into Lillard鈥檚 connections in Charlottesville with Montessori schools to test whether children who are Montessori-educated show larger backward digit spans than children who are educated in conventional schools, as expected given the emphasis Montessori schools place on literacy and numeracy.

Doebel said the 4-VA support not only helped the project be successful but made a difference for the student researchers as well. 鈥淎s a result of this funding, my students have progressed in their career trajectories鈥擩ordan is now at the University of Maryland as a research coordinator in a National Institutes of Health-funded lab, and he鈥檚 hoping to gain admittance to a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology. He got that opportunity in part because he participated in this project where he engaged real research experience.鈥

The original project has also led to a further study that will investigate the role of language in working memory by exploring how bilingual children with varying degrees of exposure to numerical language perform on the backward digit span task. This project is led by Victoria Rabii, a PhD student in George Mason鈥檚 Applied Developmental Psychology Program. Funded by a听Presidential Scholarship, Rabii is being mentored by Doebel and psychology professor Adam Winsler.

The goal of this project is to better understand how young children鈥檚 working memory performance may be affected by their proficiency with relative linguistic concepts. 鈥淧reviously, when children scored low on the task, it was pretty common for this to be interpreted as indicating low working memory ability,鈥 said Doebel. 鈥淏ut now things are changing a bit, and we are asking whether children may show better performance if they are more fluent with the specific content that is integral to the task.鈥

Personally and professionally, Doebel is grateful for the collaboration with Lillard. 鈥淎ngeline has been a major mentor for me. 听We have published together previously, and we are always thinking about new project ideas that could lead to external funding. This likely never would have happened if not for 4-VA,鈥 said Doebel.