Working memory for spatial sequences: Developmental and evolutionary factors in encoding ordinal and relational structures

Abstract

Sequence learning is a ubiquitous facet of human and animal cognition. Here, using a common sequence reproduction task, we investigated whether and how the ordinal and relational structures linking consecutive elements are acquired by human adults, children, and macaque monkeys. While children and monkeys exhibited significantly lower precision than adults for spatial location and temporal order information, only monkeys appeared to exceedingly focus on the first item. Most importantly, only humans, regardless of age, spontaneously extracted the spatial relations between consecutive items and used a chunking strategy to compress sequences in working memory. Monkeys did not detect such relational structures, even after extensive training. Monkey behavior was captured by a conjunctive coding model, whereas a chunk-based conjunctive model explained more variance in humans. These age- and species-related differences are indicative of developmental and evolutionary mechanisms of sequence encoding and may provide novel insights into the uniquely human cognitive capacities.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT

Sequence learning, the ability to encode the order of discrete elements and their relationships presented within a sequence, is a ubiquitous facet of cognition among humans and animals. By exploring sequence processing abilities at different human developmental stages and in non-human primates, we found only humans, regardless of age, spontaneously extracted the spatial relations between consecutive items and used an internal language to compress sequences in working memory. The findings provided insights into understanding the origins of sequence capabilities in humans and how it evolves through development to identify the unique aspects of human cognitive capacity, which includes the comprehension, learning, and production of sequences, and perhaps above all, language processing.