Working memory in children: What parents and teachers need to know

© 2022 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

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Working memory is often likened to the RAM in a computer. The more you lot have, the faster y'all can procedure information. Just immature children have smaller working memory capacities than adults. And some kids confront special challenges. What's at stake? How can yous tell if a kid is struggling? What tin can we do to help kids develop stronger working memory skills? Hither's an show-based guide.

What is working memory, and why is information technology important?

Working memory, also known as WM, is a bundle of mechanisms that allows us to maintain a train of thought.

Information technology'due south what we utilise to plan and comport out an action — the mental workspace where we manipulate information, crisis numbers, and see with our "mind'southward centre" (Cowan 2010; Miller et al 1960).

• Tin you add together 23 and 69 in your head?
• Remember a list of grocery shop items without writing them downward?
• Think the seating arrangements of a dinner party afterwards a brief glimpse at the table?

These tasks tap working retention, and whether or not you lot succeed depends on your working retention chapters, or WMC.

People with larger capacities can juggle more information at once. This helps them process data more quickly, and the benefits are well-documented. People with higher-than-average working memory capacity are more likely to excel in the classroom.

For example, when researchers have tracked the development of primary schoolhouse children, they've plant that early gains in working memory predict later achievement in mathematics (Li and Geary 2013; Li and Geary 2017).

Working memory is also predictive of language skills, similar the power to continue track of the ideas presented in a long or complex sentence  (Zhou et al 2017).

On the flip side, individuals with poor working memory skills at a disadvantage. They are more probable to struggle with mathematics and reading. They may as well struggle with post-obit spoken directions. In that location is too much to juggle, and they lose track of what they are supposed to do.

But what'southward normal? Doesn't working memory develop as a kid gets older?

Yes. When researchers have administered the same WM tests across historic period, they've found evidence for steady improvement, with adults performing almost twice as well as immature children (Gatherole et al 2004; Gatherole and Alloway 2007).

For example, in WM tasks dependent on tracking items in a briefly-presented visual array, adults remember approximately 3 or 4 objects (Cowan 2016). Five-year-olds think simply half every bit many (Riggs et al 2006).

So how can we tell if a child has a low working memory chapters for his or her historic period?

Researchers gauge that 10-15% of schoolhouse age children are struggling with low working retentiveness capacity (Holmes et al 2009; Fried et al 2016). How tin we identify these kids?

A professional diagnosis depends on administering special tests, like the Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children – Working Memory (CABC-WM), or the Automatic Working Memory Assessment (which you lot tin read nigh hither).

But yous can also expect for everyday signs. Co-ordinate to Susan Gatherole and Tracey Alloway (2007), kids with working memory difficulties typically

• have normal social relationships with peers;
• are reserved during group activities in the classroom, and sometimes fail to answer directly questions;
• find information technology hard to follow instructions;
• lose track during complicated tasks, and may somewhen carelessness these tasks;
• brand place-keeping errors (skipping or repeating steps);
• show incomplete recollect;
• appear to be hands distracted, inattentive, or "zoned out"; and
• have trouble with activities that crave both storage (remembering) and processing (manipulating information).

Exercise poor working memory skills mean that a child isn't smart? Practise strong working retentivity skills mean that a kid is highly intelligent?

No.

Working retentiveness affects how we learn. Information technology helps us stay focused when at that place are distractions. It can have an impact on how well we perform on tests, including accomplishment tests and IQ tests. But we can't equate WM with overall intelligence.

For instance, take "fluid intelligence" — what psychologists ascertain every bit "the ability to reason through and solve novel problems" (Shipstead et al 2016).

Fluid intelligence doesn't just demand that we keep relevant information in mind. It also requires that nosotros discard — stop thinking about — information that is irrelevant. Nosotros need to forget outdated ideas in society to make room for new ones (Shipstead et al 2016).

Thus, it isn't so much the size of mental notepad that matters, but whether nosotros are filling that notepad with the virtually promising information. Just having a larger WM chapters doesn't necessarily brand y'all smarter.

Then there is the evidence from IQ tests: Working retention capacity doesn't always correlate with IQ.

Some kids perform well on IQ tests and even so have relatively mediocre WM skills (Alloway and Alloway 2010). How is this possible? Tests like the Wechsler Intelligence Calibration for Children (WISC) take singled-out subtests. Some specifically target working memory. Others don't.

In addition, there are components of intelligence that go largely unmeasured by IQ tests, and don't correlate with working memory capacity.

Ane instance is rationality and logic. It'south a reflective fashion of thought that IQ tests ignore. Merely it'south essential for making smart decisions, and it'due south not clear that working memory capacity has much of an bear on. In recent experiments, people with higher WMCs were but every bit likely as other folks to experience biased, faulty reasoning (Robinson and Unsworth 2017).

Finally, it's important to remember that working memory isn't a single, unitary organisation. There are different types of WM, and each blazon is associated with different kinds of thinking.

For example, verbal working memory predicts improve performance on verbal tasks, but not spatial tasks.

Spatial working retentivity (tracking where items are located) is linked with better spatial skills, just not superior verbal ability (Shah and Miyaki 1996).

A third type of WM — being able to remember visual imagery — is linked with its own special advantages (Fanari et al 2019).

And there may be other, distinct types of working memory, like the ability to keep track of sequences (east.g., the order in which items appear on a listing). "Series order" working retentiveness is linked with meliorate arithmetic performance (Attout and Majerus 2018; Carpenter et al 2018).

And so differences in cognitive performance are related to differences in working retention chapters. But they effects tin be pretty specific. For example, a kid with dyscalculia (a mathematical learning disability) might exam normally in verbal WM, but lag behind in "series order" WM (Attout and Majerus 2015).

What about other learning disabilities and developmental disorders?

Working memory problems can make it more than difficult for young children learning to read. And deficits in exact working retention have been linked with reading comprehension problems in older children (Peng et al 2018).

Kids with autism are also more probable to feel working memory problems, with deficits in spatial WM existence more than common than deficits in verbal working memory (Wang et al 2017).

Children with attending deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more probable than normally-developing kids to endure from impairments of verbal working retentiveness (Ramos et al 2019; Kennedy et al 2019).

What tin can we practice to boost working memory skills? Can we improve working memory by playing simple retentivity games?

Yeah, only not necessarily in a fashion that is helpful for school achievement.

You might have heard of reckoner-based retentiveness games that are supposed to enhance WM, or even IQ. Do they actually work? It depends on what you hateful by "work."

For case, consider the computer-based training plan developed by Cogmed.

In i study, researchers identified kids with low WMC, and assigned these children to play a series of estimator games designed to claiming their WM skills (Holmes et al 2009). Some of these games  included:

• Hearing a serial of messages read aloud ("Thousand, W, Q, T, F…") and repeating them dorsum.
• Watching a battery of lamps light up, one at a time, and and then recalling the right sequence past clicking the correct locations with a figurer mouse.
• Hearing and watching a sequence of numbers while they are spoken aloud and flashed on a keypad. Later on each sequence, the student is asked to reproduce the sequence in reverse social club by hitting the right digits on the keypad.

For children in a control group, the difficulty level of these tasks remained easy throughout the study. But for kids in the treatment group, the program was adaptive, i.e., a student was given progressively more than difficult tasks as his or her performance improved.

After about 6 weeks of training, researchers re-tested the students' working memory skills, and the results were pretty dramatic. While both groups improved, the kids in the adaptive program did much meliorate. Their average gains were 3 to four times college than those of kids in the control group.

Just there was a crucial catch: Improvements were establish only on tests that closely resembled the training games. And that has been the pattern in other studies.

Training helps people get ameliorate at the specific tasks for which they are trained. But it doesn't seem to help people perform better in other areas — like reading or mathematics.

"Far transfer effects" haven't panned out — not in the largest,  all-time-designed, most carefully controlled studies conducted to date (Sala and Gobet 2017; Melby-Lervåg et al 2016; Shiphead et al 2012).

Then if you are interested in improving a child's operation in working retentivity games, so this blazon of training is worthwhile. And perchance someday nosotros'll observe out these games deliver long-term benefits that researchers haven't yet been able to detect.

But if you're goal is to assistance your child in the classroom, information technology probably makes more than sense to target the tasks that are giving him or her trouble.

If a child struggles with mathematics, seek out special training in the relevant mathematical skills — like counting, number sense, or basic arithmetic calculations (Kyttälä et al 2015).

If a child is having trouble with reading, look for programs that designed for kids who need to build literacy skills (Melby-Lervåg et al 2016).

What else tin can we exercise?

Every bit Susan Gathercole and Tracey Alloway note, we tin can help children compensate for WM limitations in a variety of means. For example:

• We can break downwardly tasks into smaller subroutines, so kids can tackle just one component at a time.
• We tin can conform the way we communicate, then we don't introduce also much fabric at once, and provide children with regular reminders of what they need to exercise next.
• We can ask kids to repeat back new information, and assistance them connect information technology with what they already know.
• Nosotros can prompt kids with regular reminders of what to exercise next, and encourage them to ask questions when they feel lost.
• We can teach them how to create and use their own retentiveness aids — similar taking notes.

And research suggests other tactics too. To go the most from your WMC, y'all need to sympathise how it functions. What disrupts WM? What tricks permit people to pack more data in the mental workspace?

For more information, check out these opens in a new window show-based tips for improving working memory performance.

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References: Working memory in children

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Attout Fifty and Majerus South. 2018. Serial order working memory and numerical ordinal processing share common processes and predict arithmetics abilities. Br J Dev Psychol. 36(2):285-298.

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Content last modified 12/2019

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