Development of visuo-spatial memory span 2 Abstract There is an important debate in the literature about the possible causes of developmental increases in working-memory span scores. In the present study, we tested the role of structure in relation to the age-related increases in visuo-spatial span performance. To that end, children and adults between nine and nineteen years old conducted struc...

BACKGROUND Pediatric ADHD is associated with impairments in working memory, but these deficits often go undetected when using clinic-based tests such as digit span backward. AIMS The current study pilot-tested minor administration/scoring modifications to improve digit span backward's construct and predictive validities in a well-characterized sample of children with ADHD. METHODS AND PROCE...

This study aims to investigate the effects of working memory span on listening tests that do not include preview questions. In the first test session, question stems and answer options were only provided through oral input. However, in the second session, the same 31 test takers were allowed to read the question stems and answer options in a multiple-choice listening test. The gap score between...

BACKGROUND Parkinson's disease patients are at an elevated risk of developing cognitive impairment. Although cognitive impairment is one of the strongest predictors of quality of life, dopaminergic anti-parkinsonian medications are designed to target motor symptoms. However, there is substantial evidence that dopamine also impacts cognition, in particular working memory. It is therefore critica...

OBJECTIVE The evidence for verbal working memory deficits in schizophrenia has been inconsistent. Few studies have evaluated verbal working memory in the first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients, who likely share the genetic diathesis for schizophrenia but not the potential confounds associated with chronic mental illness. METHOD The Wechsler Digit Span Task was used to investigate ve...

Patients with phonologic alexia show impaired pseudoword (PW) reading, and frequently are impaired in reading functors and words with affixes. Phonological alexia has been attributed to a disturbance in the orthography to phonology reading route. Alternatively, it has been hypothesized that the deficit is one of phonologic processing not specific to reading, consistent with the frequent concomi...

How to best measure working memory capacity is an issue of ongoing debate. Besides established complex span tasks, which combine short-term memory demands with generally unrelated secondary tasks, there exists a set of paradigms characterized by continuous and simultaneous updating of several items in working memory, such as the n-back, memory updating, or alpha span tasks. With a latent variab...

Greater working memory capacity is usually associated with greater ability to maintain information in the face of interruptions. In two experiments, we found that some types of interruptions actually lead to greater forgetting among high-span people than among low-span people. Specifically, an instruction designed to change mental context resulted in significant forgetting for high-span people ...