Brief Report Visuospatial bootstrapping: Implicit binding of verbal working memory to visuospatial representations in children and adults Stephen Darling a,⇑ , Mary-Jane Parker a , Karen E. Goodall a , Jelena Havelka b , Richard J. Allen b a Division of Psychology and Sociology, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh EH21 6UU, UK b Institute for Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK article info Article history: Received 13 May 2013 Revised 8 October 2013 Available online 25 November 2013 Keywords: Working memory Verbal memory Spatial memory Visual memory Bootstrapping Episodic Buffer abstract When participants carry out visually presented digit serial recall, their performance is better if they are given the opportunity to encode extra visuospatial information at encoding—a phenomenon that has been termed visuospatial bootstrapping. This bootstrapping is the result of integration of information from different modality- specific short-term memory systems and visuospatial knowledge in long term memory, and it can be understood in the context of recent models of working memory that address multimodal bind- ing (e.g., models incorporating an episodic buffer). Here we report a cross-sectional developmental study that demonstrated visuospa- tial bootstrapping in adults (n = 18) and 9-year-old children (n = 15) but not in 6-year-old children (n = 18). This is the first developmental study addressing visuospatial bootstrapping, and results demonstrate that the developmental trajectory of boot- strapping is different from that of basic verbal and visuospatial working memory. This pattern suggests that bootstrapping (and hence integrative functions such as those associated with the epi- sodic buffer) emerge independent of the development of basic working memory slave systems during childhood. Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 0022-0965/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2013.10.004 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: sdarling@qmu.ac.uk (S. Darling). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 119 (2014) 112–119 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp