The development of working memory: further note on the comparability of two models of working memory

This paper is a set of reflections on Kemps, De Rammelaere, and Desmet's article (2000, this issue), in which the two models by Baddeley and Pascual-Leone are compared. First, some of the similarities and differences between the two models which we identified in a 1994 paper (de Ribaupierre & Bailleux, 1994) are briefly summarized and reexamined in the light of more recent work. Second, we debate the issue of whether each model makes a specific contribution to the explanation of some of Kemps et al.'s results, that is, of whether they can be considered to be complementary. Third, we argue for the necessity of theoretical task analyses, in view of the divergent results obtained in the two tasks used (the Corsi and the Peanut tasks), notably different developmental profiles, and an overall higher level of performance in the Corsi task. Finally, we briefly summarize a very similar study in which we also used Mr. Peanut with concurrent tasks in children and in young adults and in which we obtained rather different results. By comparing the experimental procedures used in the two studies, we contribute some exploratory hypotheses, while raising issues that can easily be generalized to other visuo-spatial working memory tasks.