Abstract

The present work is aimed at analyzing working memory in preschoolers. To this purpose 247 children aged between 4 and 6 years were administered with 3 verbal and 3 visuo-spatial working memory tasks that require different degrees of elaboration of the material to remember (Lanfranchi et al., 2004). The results showed that in children aged between 4 and 6 performance increases with age in every task. Moreover the data lead to hypothesize that, since 4 years of age, in working memory domain-general components, that work supported by verbal and visuo-spatial domain-specific stores, are in place. Factor analysis results showed that this relationship is stronger for visuospatial than for verbal working memory components. Finally the two stores appear to be moderately associated. The results are discussed in terms of Baddeley's (1986) and Cornoldi and Vecchi's (2000) working memory models.