Table 1.

Studies that investigated the effect of proactive interference (PI) on children’s WM performance. The list is ordered by the age of the youngest participants. PI - proactive interference, STM - short term memory, Brown-Peterson - Brown-Peterson task (see text for details.)

Authors	year	age (range)	paradigm	modality of stimuli	Results
Tyrrell et al.	1990	20–30 weeks	paired comparison test of preference for novelty	visual	Infants were familiarized with upright photographs, rotated photographs, or rotated caricatures and all infants were tested with upright photographs (novel vs. familiar). Only infants in the caricature group had a novelty preference (which is evidence of a release from PI).
Esrov et al.	1974	3–4 years	STM task (/w release from PI)	visual/auditory	A buildup of PI and a release from PI was observed.
Reutener & Fang	1985	3–5 years	Brown-Peterson	visual	A buildup of PI and a release from PI was observed.
Rosner	1972	4–5 years	Brown-Peterson (w/ release from PI)	visual	Testing with repeated items produced a buildup of PI whereas testing with novel items did not. Location shift did not result in a release from PI, but a presentation of novel items did.
Aydmune et al.	2019	6–8 years	Brown-Peterson (w/ release from PI)	visual/auditory	The ability to cope with PI and fluid intelligence did not signficantly correlate.
Cann et al.	1973	7–8 years	Brown-Peterson (w/ release from PI)	auditory	A buildup of PI and a release from PI was observed.
Tyrrell et al.	1981	7–11 years	Brown-Peterson (w/ release from PI)	visual/auditory	Build-up of PI occurred in all ages and in both modalities. A release from PI in both age groups was only observed if the stimuli was changed from auditory to visual but not from visual to auditory.
Bjorklund et al.	1982	8 years	Brown-Peterson (w/ release from PI)	visual	A buildup of PI both when items were typical of the category or when they were atypical. Release from PI was only observed when the items were typical.
Halford et al.	1988	8–9 years/15 years/adults	item recognition task	visual	The effect of PI increased with set size in all age groups.
Loosli et al.	2014	8–10 years/11–14 years/adults	Recent probes and N-back	visual	In the recent probes task children commited more PI related errors than young adults, but in the N-back task younger children commited less PI related errors than young adults.
Bayliss & Jarrold	2015	9 years	forgetting tasks/WM span tasks/storage tasks/processing-efficiancy tasks	visual/auditory	Children’s working memory span performance can be explained by three separable factors: storage ability, general speed of processing, and the rate at which one forgets information.
Leslie	1975	9–11 years	serial-order STM task (w/ release from PI)	visual	Typically developing children and children who had a developmental delay in reading were compared. Both groups showed buildup and release of PI. Overall performance in children with a reading delay was lower.
Kail	2002	9–12 years/adults	Brown-Peterson	auditory	The ability to cope with PI increased with age. Overall performance was correlated with age.
Borella et al.	2010	10–11 years	numerical updating and Brown-Peterson	visual	Poor reading comprehenders were less accurate in WM tasks and more susceptible to PI than good reading comprehenders.