The role of representational strength in verbal updating: Evidence from 19- and 24-month-olds

• Studies examine children’s ability to update absent object representation following language.
• Varied object exposure tested if updating depends on the object’s representational strength.
• Study 1 shows that the 19-month-olds, not 24-month-olds, update only in the high exposure group.
• Activation of the object representation improves 18-month-olds’ ability to update (Study 2).
• Exposure to the object representation re-activates previously formed representation (Study 3).

The current research investigated the role of object familiarity in children’s ability to update the representation of an absent object via language. In Study 1, the degree of object familiarity was manipulated by the amount of time children were exposed to an object. The results showed that when 19- and 24-month-olds were minimally exposed to the object, only the 24-month-olds were able to incorporate newly heard information about it by selecting the new version of the object. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that the younger children’s failure to update is due to their failure to activate an object’s weak representation in working memory. When the object’s weak representation was reactivated (by seeing a depiction of the object) prior to the language input, the younger children successfully updated their representation of the object. The findings are discussed in light of the graded representation account.