The Developing Impact of Verbal Labels on Visual Memories in Children

The capacity limitations of visual working memory may be bypassed by verbal labeling. In adults, labeling increases estimates of both quantity and quality of visual working memory. However, we do not know when children begin to use labeling and whether labeling similarly benefits visual memories of children under and over age 7. We assessed whether children benefit from prompted and spontaneous labeling opportunities, examining how labeling affects the storage of categorical (prototypical) and continuous (fine-grained) color information. Participants memorized colored candies for a continuous reproduction test either while remaining silent, labeling the colors aloud, or saying irrelevant syllables (discouraging verbal labeling). Mixture modeling confirmed that both categorical and continuous representations increased with age. Our labeling manipulation showed that spontaneous labeling increased with age. For the youngest children, prompted labeling especially boosted categorical memory, whereas labeling benefited categorical and continuous memory similarly in the older age groups.