Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search…

Working memory has been proposed to account for the differential rates in progress young children make in writing. One crucial aspect of learning to write is the encoding (i.e., integration) and retrieval of the correct phoneme-grapheme pairings, known as binding. In addition to executive functions, binding is regarded as central to the concept of…

Background: There is emerging evidence that individuals with developmental dyslexia show deficits in visual-spatial attention. This study focused on visual searches and examined whether visual search deficits would be found in Chinese children with dyslexia. More importantly, we examined the associations between dyslexia and distinct types of…

The aim of this study was to investigate the early characteristics of four profiles of readers established in second grade (7-8 years of age): good readers, specific poor decoders, specific poor comprehenders and general poor readers. These profiles were compared retrospectively on a range of measures administered 2 years earlier, in kindergarten.…

The psychometric function of single-letter identification is typically described as a function of stimulus intensity. However, the effect of stimulus exposure duration on letter identification remains poorly described. This is surprising because the effect of exposure duration has played a central role in modeling performance in whole and partial…

This study investigated the relationship among working memory, processing speed, math performance, and reactivity to stress in 83 Grade 1 children. Specifically, 39 children with math disability (MD) were compared to 44 children who are typically achieving (TA) in mathematics. It is the first study to use a physiological index of stress (salivary…

Research Findings: The present study evaluated the impact of a working memory (WM) stimulation program on the development of WM and early literacy skills (ELS) in preschoolers from socioeconomically deprived rural and urban schools in Chile. The sample consisted of 268 children, 144 in the intervention group and 124 in the comparison group. The…

Working memory is devoted to the temporary storage and on-line manipulation of information. Recently, an integrative system termed the episodic buffer has been proposed to integrate and hold information being entered or retrieved from episodic memory. Although the brain system supporting such an integrative buffer is still in debate, the medial…