THE ROLE OF WORKING MEMORY AND UPDATING IN COLOURED RAVEN MATRICES IN TIPICALLY DEVELOPING CHILDREN

A large body of evidence indicates that working memory significantly correlates with performance on fluid intelligence tasks such as Raven’s tests. However, light still needs to be shed on which particular aspects of working memory might be most critically related to fluid intelligence, and whether working memory updating - which appears crucial to intellectual functioning (see, for example, Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, and Howerter, 2000; Friedman and coauthors, 2008), although not offering a unique explanation of variance - has a prominent role in fluid intelligence. To address these issues more closely, the present study presented one hundred and thirty-four participants (aged 4 years 6 months to 11 years 6 months) with the Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices, an updating task, and a battery of working memory tasks (varying in degree of active attentional control requested). Our findings confirm that (1) fluid intelligence, WM, and updating have similar developmental trends, revealing a linear increase with age and suggesting an important link between these three aspects; (2) working memory plays an important part in explaining fluid intelligence; (3) updating information in working memory, as the best predictor of performance in the Raven tasks., is critical to fluid intelligence, particularly in the context of development.