Working Memory Impairments in Children with Specific Arithmetic Learning Difficulties

Dysfunctional neural network of spatial working memory contributes to developmental dyscalculia

“…Van der Sluis and colleagues (2005) showed that children with arithmetic disabilities performed worse on a task requiring the memorization of dynamic visual information -these results are consistent with other findings (McLean & Hitch, 1999), where lower performance of children with arithmetic disabilities on the Corsi Block Tapping task is reported.…”

“…Interestingly, in our study there are no differences between groups regarding the digit span backward, which is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 predominantly a measure of verbal working memory. Some studies have found impairments in this domain (D'Amico & Guarnera, 2005;Rosselli et al, 2006), whereas others suggest that children with DD do not appear to have a deficit in working memory for language-related tasks (McLean & Hitch, 1999;Schuchardt et al, 2008). Our results may be explained by the small group size of examined children and therefore additional research about the role of verbal working memory in children with DD is required.…”

“…Several studies investigated the role of working memory in normally achieving children and children with DD (Bull, Espy, & Wiebe, 2008;D'Amico & Guarnera, 2005;Geary et al., 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 2000; Geary & Hoard, 2001;McLean & Hitch, 1999;Rosselli et al, 2006;Siegel & Ryan, 1989). Van der Sluis and colleagues (2005) showed that children with arithmetic disabilities performed worse on a task requiring the memorization of dynamic visual information -these results are consistent with other findings (McLean & Hitch, 1999), where lower performance of children with arithmetic disabilities on the Corsi Block Tapping task is reported.…”

“…Concerning the different aspects of working memory, children with poor arithmetic performance generally appear to have normal phonological working memory (McLean & Hitch, 1999;Siegel & Ryan, 1989), although their capacity of spatial working memory is impaired.…”

Working Memory in Portuguese Children With Developmental Dyslexia

“…One point per trial was given for correct recall. The Trail (Part A and B), which is similar to the popular Trail Making Test, was chosen because it is another frequently used measure of CE functioning (Andersson, 2008;Baddeley, 1996;McLean & Hitch, 1999). In Trail-A, 25 encircled numbers were randomly distributed on a sheet of paper.…”