Impact of Working Memory Training Targeting the Central Executive on Kindergarteners’ Numerical Skills

Abstract

Working memory capacities are associated with mathematical development. Many studies have tried to improve working memory abilities through training. Furthermore, the central executive has been shown to be the component of working memory, which is the most strongly related to numerical and arithmetical skills. Therefore, we developed a training program that specifically targeted the central executive to examine the possible impact on kindergarteners' working memory and numerical abilities. Thirty-four 5-6 year olds were randomly assigned to the experimental or the control conditions. Both groups received 16 30-minute sessions of their respective training program. The experimental group was trained with games tapping the central executive and the control group received a vocabulary-learning program. The results showed an immediate training effect on one central executive task and an effect of training appeared on another central executive task at follow-up, 6 months later. However, no impact was observed on numerical and arithmetical skills.

Can working memory training improve preschoolers’ numerical abilities?

“…These results are in line with several studies which showed that it is possible to train WM in adults (E. Dahlin, Nyberg, Backman, & Neely, 2008;Olesen et al, 2004;Westerberg & Klingberg, 2007), in children (Bergman-Nutley & Klingberg, 2014;K. I. E. Dahlin, 2013;Dunning et al, 2013;Gray et al, 2012;Holmes et al, 2009;Klingberg et al, 2005;Klingberg et al, 2002;Van der Molen et al, 2010) as well as in preschoolers (Honoré & Noël, 2017;Kroesbergen et al, 2014;Passolunghi & Costa, 2016;Thorell et al, 2009). However, no effect was observed on the PL or the verbal CE; the effects were therefore restricted to the trained modality.…”

“…Then, the present study shows that improved visuo-spatial WM capacities have a very small impact on mathematics; it seems to help children in their current learning related to the VSSP, but this effect is very weak and there is no transfer effect to arithmetic. Therefore, according to the present findings together with those of our previous study (Honoré & Noël, 2017), it seems more effective to directly train specific numerical processes to impact numerical development. Indeed, WM training leads to improvement in counting skills only if a numerical material is used (Kroesbergen et al, 2014) and Kyttälä et al (2015) showed that training counting only, but not counting and WM abilities together, improves counting skills.…”

“…As concerns numerical abilities, the impact, if any, is very weak. Among the five studies (Honoré & Noël, 2017;Kanerva & Kyttala, 2016;Kroesbergen et al, 2014;Kyttälä et al, 2015;Passolunghi & Costa, 2016) which assessed a possible impact on young children's numerical skills, one of them did not find any transfer effect to numerical or arithmetical skills (Honoré & Noël, 2017), two of them failed to find an impact on counting (Kanerva & Kyttala, 2016;Kyttälä et al, 2015), another observed a significant improvement in counting and collection comparison (Kroesbergen et al, 2014) Kroesbergen et al (2014) and Passolunghi and Costa (2016)'s studies, an effect was observed on counting skills, which are part of the preschool program, but their training program included PL tasks, which are more related to counting than visuo-spatial CE (Noël, 2009).…”

“…In all these four studies (Kanerva & Kyttala, 2016;Kroesbergen et al, 2014;Kyttälä et al, 2015;Passolunghi & Costa, 2016), the effect of the intervention on preschoolers' numerical competences was measured by a global test, the Early Numeracy Test that focuses mainly on counting skills, as well as by a dot comparison task (Kroesbergen et al, 2014). More recently, we (Honoré & Noël, 2017) conducted a WM training study in which we aimed at examining the differential impact of WM training on specific numerical processes, including addition. However, we only observed a slight improvement of 5-6-year olds' CE abilities after 16 sessions of training targeting that memory component and we failed to observe any impact on numerical processes and arithmetic.…”

“…It is possible that the failure to obtain any impact on numerical processes is due to the weak improvement measured in WM. In (Honoré & Noël, 2017), the WM training program was developed by the authors themselves and involved different verbal and visuo-spatial games that children played in small groups (n-back, updating tasks…). In the present study, we wanted to use a program that automatically adapts its difficulty level to the child's level of performance in order to maximize its efficacy.…”