Raw data related to: Developmental differences in the impact of perceptual salience on short-term memory performance and meta-memory skills

In everyday life, individuals are surrounded by many stimuli that compete to access attention and memory. Evidence shows that perceptually salient stimuli have more chances to capture attention resources, thus to be encoded into short-term memory (STM). However, the impact of perceptual salience on STM at different developmental stages is entirely unexplored. Here we assessed STM performance and meta-memory skills of 6, 10, and 18 years-old participants (total N = 169) using a delayed match-to-sample task. On each trial, participants freely explored a complex (cartoon-like) scene for 4 seconds. After a retention interval of 4 seconds, they discriminated the same/different position of a target-object extracted from the area of maximal or minimal salience of the initially-explored scene. Then, they provided a confidence judgment of their STM performance, as an index of meta-memory skills. When taking into account ‘confident’ responses, we found increased STM performance following targets at maximal vs. minimal salience only in adult participants. Similarly, only adults showed enhanced meta-memory capabilities following maximal vs. minimal salience targets. These findings documented a late development in the impact of perceptual salience on STM performance and in the improvement of metacognitive capabilities to properly judge the content of one’s own memory representation.日常生活中，个体周遭充斥着诸多竞相争夺注意力与记忆资源的刺激物。研究表明，具有知觉显著性（perceptually salient）的刺激物更易捕获注意力资源，进而被编码进入短时记忆（short-term memory, STM）。然而，知觉显著性对不同发育阶段个体短时记忆的影响，迄今尚未得到任何探索。 本研究采用延迟匹配样本任务，对6岁、10岁及18岁的被试（总样本量N=169）的短时记忆表现与元记忆（meta-memory）技能进行了评估。在每一轮试次中，被试可自由观看一段复杂的（卡通风格）场景，时长为4秒。经过4秒的保持间隔后，被试需要辨别从初始观看场景的最大或最小显著性区域中提取的目标物体的位置是否一致。随后，被试需对自身的短时记忆表现作出信心判断，以此作为元记忆技能的评估指标。 当仅纳入"有信心"的反应数据时，研究发现仅在成年被试群体中，相较于最小显著性目标，最大显著性目标对应的短时记忆表现更优。类似地，仅成年被试在面对最大显著性目标时，其元认知（metacognitive）能力相较最小显著性目标时得到了提升。本研究结果表明，知觉显著性对短时记忆表现的影响，以及个体准确判断自身记忆表征内容的元认知能力的提升，均呈现出较晚的发育轨迹。