Working memory components and intelligence in children

Working memory as a moderator of training and transfer of analogical reasoning in children

“…From the literature and our results we can conclude that WM is related -to a certain degree -to inductive reasoning ability in children (Engel de Abreu, Conway, & Gathercole, 2010;Tillman et al, 2008). This study investigated whether measures for verbal and visuo-spatial WM would explain individual differences in the degree of progression a child demonstrates as a consequence of a short training in figural analogy solving.…”

“…Inductive reasoning ability and working memory capacity are well-established constructs in cognitive ability tests and known to be related (Kail, 2007;Sternberg & Gardner, 1983;Tillman et al, 2008). Performance change and ability to transfer knowledge to novel situations, such as in the reversal task, are less often included in the assessment of intellectual abilities (Bosma & Resing, 2006;Elliott et al, 2010).…”

“…Many studies have demonstrated a strong relationship between working memory (WM) and inductive reasoning ability in adults (e.g., Buehner, Krumm, & Pick, 2005;Kyllonen & Christal, 1990) as well as children (e.g., Alloway, Gathercole, Willis, & Adams, 2004;Tillman, Nyberg, & Bohlin, 2008). Generally these studies focus on the role of working memory on inductive reasoning performance in a single testing session.…”

Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm

“…There is general agreement that representational capacity involves (1) modality-specific components that hold information for a very short period of time, (2) a short-term storage that holds a part of information that is available in modality-specific components for further processing according to a goal, and (3) an executive component that involves processes applied on the information represented in short-term storage for the sake of the goal (Baddeley 1990;Hornung et al 2011;Tillman et al 2008). Wood (2011) showed that there are storage systems for spatiotemporal information related to the movement of objects in space, for object identity information related to the retention of the characteristics of objects, and for snapshot information related to the location of objects.…”

The structure of working memory and how it relates to intelligence in children

“…Previous findings in children on this issue are unclear: some studies suggest that, when the variance that WM and STM have in common is controlled, only the residual WM factor reveals a significant link with intelligence (Engel De Abreu et al, 2010); other research indicates that the relationship between WM and intelligence is explained primarily by STM (Hornung et al, 2011). In addition, some authors have argued that both storage and executive processes in the WM system can independently predict intelligence (Tillman, Nyberg, & Bohlin, 2008), but well-controlled WM processes have a higher predictive power in typically-developing children than poorly-controlled STM processes (Cornoldi, Giofrè, Calgaro, & Stupiggia, 2013). The inclusion of both verbal and visuospatial STM tasks in our study also gave us an opportunity to test whether the latter are more closely related to intelligence than the former (as suggested by Kane et al, 2004).…”