Short-term serial recall in ADDH, normal, and reading-disabled boys

Abstract

Short-term retention of verbal items of span and subspan length was examined in hyperactive (ADDH), normal and non-ADDH reading-disabled boys. Performance of ADDH and normal boys did not differ on three measures of verbal serial recall. Thus, it appears that the cognitive deficits of ADDH children cannot be attributed to deficient retention of stimuli. In contrast, reading-disabled (RD) boys performed significantly more poorly than both normal and ADDH boys when required to recall verbal items following "filled" delay intervals in which the children were required to perform a competing verbal activity. The results suggest that verbal encoding of RD children is particularly vulnerable to interference from other verbal stimuli. ADDH and RD children may represent subsamples of children demonstrating academic difficulties, with each group showing a characteristic pattern of cognitive deficits.

Supraspan verbal memory in attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity normal and reading-disabled boys

“…In addition, as reported earlier (Benezra & Douglas, 1988), these same RD boys had more difficulty than controls with one of the subspan tasks in the verbal battery when a competing verbal requirement was introduced. The failure to find group differences on primacy-recency effects on Word Lists suggests that the RD boys' lower recall is not attributable to deficient rehearsal of early items.…”

“…We have explored this approach in the memory domain using a comprehensive battery of verbal and nonverbal tasks chosen to assess a broad range of rehearsal and effort demands. In an earlier paper (Benezra & Douglas, 1988), we reported results from the verbal span and subspan measures. These tasks fall at the low end of the proposed effortful-purposeful dimension.…”

“…This approach, however, has limited heuristic value. There is no sharp distinction between automatic and purposeful processes (Borcherding et al, 1988;Kahneman & Triesman, 1984), and there is evidence that the competence of ADDH children extends beyond most definitions of automatic processing (Benezra & Douglas, 1988;Douglas, 1983). Douglas (1983Douglas ( , 1988 has argued that defective self-regulatory or "executive" processes, which are responsible for the organization and monitoring of information processing, the mobilization of attention and effort throughout processing, and the inhibition of inappropriate responding, play a key role in the cognitive and behavioral deficits associated with ADDH.…”

“…Statistical analyses of the group comparisons are reported in Benezra and Douglas (1988). In summary, the three groups did not differ significantly on age or IQ.…”

Improving the Writing Performance of High School Students with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Writing Difficulties

“…Though able to identify effective strategies from a provided list, their rapid, basically effortless practice style, and inferior recall, illustrated how little those identified strategies were put into use (O'Neill & Douglas, 1996). The lack of effortful and effective execution or creation of strategies for problem-solving presented in these studies and others (e.g., Benezra & Douglas, 1988;Cornoldi, Barbieri, Gaiani, & 8 Zocchi, 1999;Purvis & Tannock, 1997;Waschbusch, Craig, Pelham, & King, 2007), suggests that instruction in specific strategy instruction may be appropriate for students with ADHD.…”