Developmental aspects of delayed matching-to-sample task performance in children

The influence of age, sex, and intelligence (IQ) on performance of a delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) task, commonly used with animals and adult human subjects to study aspects of short-term memory, was examined for 674 children, 5 to 13 years old. The data suggest that younger children were less accurate at short delays and displayed a greater decrease in accuracy as recall delay increased than older children. Children with lower IQs demonstrated consistent impairment in recall of information when compared to children with higher IQs. No significant differences in task performance were observed between boys and girls. These normative data provide insights into the developmental time course of behaviors thought to serve as metrics of short-term memory. These data will be critical for ongoing and future studies in determining whether specific clinical diagnoses, drug treatments, or other risk factors (e.g., perinatal drug exposure, pregnancy complications, exposure to toxicants) are associated with differences on specific aspects of task performance. The use of tasks that are also applicable to animal models provides great opportunities for the conduct of important comparative studies.