School of Humanities and Social Science Division of Social Science 224 The Development of Information Updating in Working Memory Supervisor: CHENG Chen / SOSC Student: QUAN Kexin / QSA Course: UROP 2100, Fall UROP 3100, Spring This study investigates the impact of gender-typed toys on children’s working memory performance, focusing on gender congruence. We hypothesized that boys would perform better with boy-typed toys, while girls would exhibit better working memory with girl-typed toys due to increased engagement and familiarity with gender-congruent toys. A working memory task was conducted involving 79 children from a kindergarten in Shenzhen, China, in which participants recalled the locations of target toys after brief exposure. Each toy was categorized as girl-typed, boy-typed, or neutral. Results indicated that, while overall performance exceeded chance levels, there were no significant differences in working memory performance based on gender congruence. These findings suggest that toy type did not differentially affect children’s working memory, highlighting the need for further research on the influence of gender-typed toys in varying contexts and with increased task difficulty. Understanding these dynamics could inform educational practices and toy design to promote equitable cognitive development. The Development of Information Updating in Working Memory Supervisor: CHENG Chen / SOSC Student: ZHANG Wenyu / QSA Course: UROP 1100, Fall UROP 2100, Spring UROP 3100, Summer This study investigated how young children learn strategic reasoning through a video-based intervention. Children aged 3-5 participated in a pre-post test design involving a tube task where an optimal (two-handed) strategy was required to guarantee success against a suboptimal (one-handed) one. Results indicated a significant overall improvement in task success following the video intervention, confirming that learning occurred. However, a child’s ability to explicitly identify the optimal strategy in an observer-choice task did not significantly predict their subsequent performance or their adoption of the strategy. Furthermore, the acquired skill did not transfer to novel, conceptually similar tasks, with performance remaining at chance levels. These findings suggest that while video demonstrations can effectively teach solutions to specific problems, the resulting knowledge in young children is highly context-bound and may operate through implicit mechanisms rather than abstract, generalizable strategic understanding.
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