Impact of WeChat public platform-based education and training on community nurses' attitudes toward death and death coping skills: a prospective multicenter single-group pre-post study.

Working memory (WM), a core component of executive function, refers to the dynamic cognitive process by which individuals temporarily encode, maintain, and manipulate information. It serves as the foundation for higher-order cognitive processes such as information integration, reasoning, and problem-solving (). The school-age period (4–15 years) represents a critical developmental window for WM, during which its functional maturation directly determines a child’s learning capacity, academic achievement, and long-term cognitive potential. Indeed, WM has been shown to effectively predict individual performance across various learning contexts, including mathematical accuracy, reading comprehension, and classroom engagement (; ; ; ; ). Globally, approximately 140 million people reside permanently at altitudes above 2,500 m, including a substantial population of school-aged children in the midst of rapid development (). Plateau regions are characterized by chronic hypobaric hypoxia, where hypoxic stress intensifies alongside rising elevation. Given that hypoxia significantly modulates central nervous system function (; ), it may disrupt the normal developmental trajectory of WM, thereby limiting cognitive function and ultimately affecting learning abilities and overall development. Therefore, a systematic investigation into the developmental characteristics and underlying regulatory mechanisms of WM in school-aged children living in moderate and high-altitude hypoxic environments is of considerable importance. Extant research has established that WM development spans from infancy to early adulthood, with the school-age period representing a critical stage of rapid functional maturation and structural refinement. During infancy (0–3 years), WM abilities improve progressively with age, accompanied by the gradual emergence of basic mnemonic strategies (): infants aged 0–12 months can perform fundamental memory operations such as temporal sequence learning and auditory cue tracking (; ; ); toddlers aged 13–24 months develop the ability to utilize perceptual contrasts and verbal counting to support memory (; ); and children aged 25–36 months can complete more complex memory tasks, including multiple-identity tracking and symbolic learning (; ; ). Upon entering the school-age years, WM enters a phase of accelerated development. In a large-scale study of over 700 children aged 4–15 years, found that the basic structure of WM is established by at least age 6, with its functional capacity continuing to expand significantly throughout elementary and middle school. Specifically, the ability to update object locations based on changes in occlusion improves with age in children aged 4–7 years (). Meanwhile, verbal WM capacity, as measured by digit span backward (DSB) tasks, nearly doubles between ages 5 and 11.5 years, increasing from an average of two digits at age 5.5 to four digits at age 10 (; ). At the neural level, children aged 9–13 years have already established a core WM network that highly overlaps with that of adults. However, their pattern of brain activation undergoes a transition from a diffuse pattern to a more focused and efficient one, reflecting the maturation of cognitive function (; ). Notably, different WM functions mature at different times. Simple maintenance functions develop relatively early, whereas more complex functions involving monitoring, updating, and attentional focus switching follow a protracted developmental trajectory that continues through adolescence and into early adulthood (; ; ). For instance, the period between ages 5 and 11 represents a phase of rapid improvement in visual maintenance, while spatial maintenance, which relies on complex sequential representation and executive control, develops more slowly and does not reach maturity until young adulthood (). Additionally, children aged 10–12 years achieve mature performance on simple memory updating tasks (1-back) but show a linear developmental trend on high-load 2-back tasks requiring interference control, a trajectory that extends from childhood into young adulthood (; ). Overall, WM functions generally peak in adulthood. Visual WM capacity increases from one to two items in infancy to four to six items in young adulthood, reaching its peak around age 30 (; ).