Attention turns looking, into seeing. Yet, little developmental research has examined the interface of attention and visual working memory (VWM), where what is seen is maintained for use in ongoing visual tasks. Using the task-evoked pupil response - a sensitive, real-time, involuntary measure of focused attention that has been shown to correlate with VWM performance in adults and older children - we examined the relationship between focused attention and VWM in 13-month-olds. We used a Delayed Match Retrieval paradigm, to test infants' VWM for object-location bindings - what went where - while recording anticipatory gaze responses and pupil dilation. We found that infants with greater focused attention during memory encoding showed significantly better memory performance. As well, trials that ended in a correct response had significantly greater pupil response during memory encoding than incorrect trials. Taken together, this shows that pupillometry can be used as a measure of focused attention in infants, and a means to identify those individuals, or moments, where cognitive effort is maximized.

Children live in a dynamic environment, in which objects continually change locations and move into and out of occlusion. Children must therefore rely on working memory to store information from the environment and to update those stored representations as the environment changes. Previous work suggests that the ability to store information in working memory increases through infancy and childhood. However, less is known about the development of the ability to update stored information. Participants were 63 4-7-year-old children (37 girls; 34 caregivers completed optional demographic forms, and those children were reported as Asian [one], Asian/White [four], Black [one], Middle East/Arab [one], or White [27]; two were Hispanic/Latinx). We asked children to keep track of arrays of hidden items that either remained where they were hidden (static trials) or swapped locations (swap trials) and then to identify from two alternatives which item was hidden in a particular location. We manipulated the number of items in the arrays and the number of times the items swapped locations in order to investigate how increasing storage and updating load impacted children's performance. We found that children's ability to update working memory developed significantly across our age range. Updating appeared to impose a significant one-time cost to working memory performance, regardless of the number of times items swapped. Our results yield new insights into the developmental trajectories of storage and updating in working memory across early childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Past researches have suggested that in regard to working memory-induced dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activation and connectivity differences between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls have not reached a consistent result. The functional integration perspective further suggests that working memory performance also modulates group differences in functional interactions of the DLPFC between patients and controls. To explore this possibility, forty-five healthy controls and forty-five patients with schizophrenia were recruited to perform a 2-back task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Each group was further divided into two subgroups based on task performance in order to examine the modulatory effect of performance on functional interactions of the DLPFC, as measured via psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analyses. We observed that, in patients with schizophrenia who exhibited impaired working memory capacity and decreased brain activation/deactivation, functional interactions between the right/left DLPFC and angular cortex were decreased relative to those of healthy controls. More importantly, we observed an interaction effect of working memory performance and diagnosis on functional connectivity between the right/left DLPFC seed region and posterior regions such as the angular cortex, fusiform gyrus, and middle occipital gyrus. This interaction effect was mainly driven by the negative correlation between functional connectivity and performance in healthy controls but by the positive correlation in patients with schizophrenia. These results demonstrate the differential effects of inter-individual differences in working memory performance on the functional interaction between the DLPFC and posterior regions in patients with schizophrenia compared to healthy controls, which may shed new light on the neural basis of working memory. Keywords: Schizophrenia, N-back, fMRI, Psychophysiological Interaction (PPI), Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC), Fusiform Gyrus, Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL)