Mr. Peanut and working memory

"Hi...my name is Mr. Peanut."

I ran across this interesting task for measuring working memory (Gsm-MW). It would appear to be a creative and interesting approach to measuring visual working memory. I couldn't resist introducing Mr. Peanut to the blog. A description of the task, as described in a recent journal article, is presented below.

• "The peanut task was adapted from Pascual-Leone (de Ribaupierre, Lecerf, & Bailleux, 2000; de Ribaupierre et al., 1989) and Case (1985) and measures WM. A clown figure (M. Peanut) was presented on a sheet of paper, with coloured spots on it (16 possible locations; Figure 5). This clown figure was then removed, and a second blank clown figure was immediately presented on a sheet of paper. The Figure 5. Study 1: The colour-peanut task. Example of a complexity 6 item. children's task was to recall the location of spots by placing coloured chips on this figure. Two versions were administered: a purple-peanut in which all spots were of the same colour and a colour-peanut in which spots were of different colours (seven possible colours). In the coloured version, children had to recall both the colour and the location. The number of locations or the number of colour-location associations to remember varied from two to five, with five items for each level of complexity. Trials of different complexity were randomly dis- tributed throughout the task, with the same order for all children. Overall exposure time was 1 s per spot; thus, a clown figure with three spots was presented during 3 s. The score used here was the total number of correct trials."

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