The purpose of this study was to im

The purpose of this study was to improve preschoolers’ working memory performance. To this aim, we analyzed the extent to which supporting goal maintenance with goal cue and actively engaging children in the task could improve preschoolers’ performance in a Brown-Peterson task requiring children to track an animated shape during the retention interval. As in task-switching paradigms, in such working memory tasks, children have to switch between different goals, the encoding goal, the secondary task goal (here tracking), the recall goal, and potentially item maintenance goal during the retention interval (see14). Hence, inspired by studies in executive control tasks, we expected that a transparent cue reminding the recall goal could favor its maintenance, leading to better recall performance. Moreover, considering the contrasted results reported in working memory studies that tempted to support goal maintenance19,20,21, we suggested that actively engaging children in the task by asking them to act on the goal cue during the retention interval, like tracking the cue with a finger, could increase the beneficial effect of cue on goal maintenance and recall performance.Findings in 5-year-olds provided some support to our predictions. While a transparent goal cue did not enhance performance when visually tracked, 5-year-old children significantly improved their recall performance when they had to follow the transparent goal cue with their finger. This result is in line with one hypothesis put forward by Bertrand and Camos20 that emphasized the role of a motor activity oriented towards the goal in helping to maintain the goal. It can also be observed that the lack of evidence for a benefit of the transparent cue when children did have to act on it echoes Fitamen et al.’s findings21. They showed no effect of the introduction (vs. absence) of a cue in working memory tasks in which children remained rather passively in front of a computer screen. Overall, these findings support the idea that preschoolers need to be actively engaged in the task to improve their memory performance. In contrast with their older peers, 4-year-olds did not show any benefit of goal cueing in the visual and finger tracking conditions. This result may seem at odds with the findings in executive control literature, which reports that the youngest children get the most benefit from goal cue12. Although further research is needed to support our interpretations, 4-year-olds’ failure to benefit from any of the two goal-cue conditions may be due to an overload introduced by complex instructions. Indeed, the supplementary instructions required to provide its status to the transparent cue, and to present the motor tracking task, were both very demanding for these younger children. Thus, this may have hampered the effect of finger tracking of the goal cue. In other words, introducing the transparent cue involved the addition of an animation before the start of the cue move across the screen. Further, accurately tracking an animated shape with their finger requires fine motor skills that might be specifically demanding on young preschoolers’ attentional resources (e.g.22). Hence, the goal-oriented motor task may have oriented 4-year-olds attention away from the recall goal maintenance. By contrast, the working memory improvement observed in 5-year-olds with a goal-oriented tracking echoes findings in the literature on gestural production.Whereas motor tracking is attentionally demanding for younger children, the benefit of performance from tracking the cue with their finger in 5-year-olds suggest that, as proposed by Golding-Meadows and colleagues23,24, motor activity can release attentional resources when it is well in reach of children’s motor abilities. Further, the finger tracking used here is a motor activity of low intensity, and low intensive motor activities have been shown to improve performance contrary to more highly intensive ones (for a review25).