Previous research has established the relevance of working memory for cognitive development. Yet the factors responsible for shaping performance in the complex span tasks used to assess working memory capacity are not fully understood. We report a study of reading span in 7- to 11-year-old children that addresses several contemporary theoretical issues. We demonstrate that both the timing and t...

Understanding speech in the presence of background sound can be challenging for older adults. Speech comprehension in noise appears to depend on working memory and executive-control processes (e.g., Heald and Nusbaum, 2014), and their augmentation through training may have rehabilitative potential for age-related hearing loss. We examined the efficacy of adaptive working-memory training (Cogmed...

OBJECTIVE To measure working memory capacity among a cohort of collegiate athletes and to compare results between athletes competing in head-contact-prone sports with those not subject to repeated head contacts. A secondary objective was to determine the effect of sport-related concussion on working memory capacity. DESIGN Ambidirectional cohort study. SETTING Athletics department at an Ame...

In this study, we focus on the possible roles of second-order syntactic recursion and working memory in terms of simple and complex span tasks in the development of second-order false belief reasoning. We tested 89 Turkish children in two age groups, one younger (4;6– 6;5 years) and one older (6;7–8;10 years). Although second-order syntactic recursion is significantly correlated with the second...

K E Y W O R D S : articulatory suppression, memory span, working memory

Working memory capacity is traditionally treated as a unitary construct that can be explained using one cognitive mechanism (e.g., storage, attention control). Several recent studies have, however, demonstrated that multiple mechanisms are needed to explain individual differences in working memory capacity. The present study focuses on three such mechanisms: Maintenance/disengagement in primary...

Repository Citation Durette, Robert T., "Operation span task's susceptibility to math anxiety: Support from fluid intelligence" (2011). This experiment tested possible math anxiety effects on the two most prominent working memory span tasks, the operation span and reading span tasks. Math anxiety effects on the performance of the processing component of the operation span task, which is math ba...

Two experiments investigated the extent to which children's mental arithmetic is constrained by working memory rather than their arithmetical competence. A span procedure was used to measure the limit on English- and German-speaking children's ability to add together pairs of multidigit numbers. The children's ages ranged from 7 years 7 months to 11 years 5 months. Spans for mental addition wer...

The authors examined the nature of the working memory deficit in persons with Parkinson's disease (PD). Three hypotheses were tested: a limited storage capacity, an impaired executive component, and a reduction of psychomotor speed. Verbal working memory was assessed in 14 PD patients without dementia and 14 matched control participants. Participants were administered a classical verbal span te...

In this study, we focus on the possible roles of second-order syntactic recursion and working memory in terms of simple and complex span tasks in the development of second-order false belief reasoning. We tested 89 Turkish children in two age groups, one younger (4;6– 6;5 years) and one older (6;7–8;10 years). Although second-order syntactic recursion is significantly correlated with the second...