Abstract
Visual working memory (VWM) is reliably predictive of fluid intelligence and academic achievements. The objective of the current study was to investigate individual differences in pre-schoolers' VWM processing by examining the association between behaviour, brain function and parent-reported measures related to the child's environment. We used a portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy system to record from the frontal and parietal cortices of 4.5-year-old children (N=74) as they completed a colour change-detection VWM task in their homes. Parents were asked to fill in questionnaires on temperament, academic aspirations, home environment and life stress. Children were median-split into a low-performing (LP) and a high-performing (HP) group based on the number of items they could successfully remember during the task. LPs increasingly activated channels in the left frontal and bilateral parietal cortices with increasing load, whereas HPs showed no difference in activation. Our findings suggest that LPs recruited more neural resources than HPs when their VWM capacity was challenged. We employed mediation analyses to examine the association between the difference in activation between the highest and lowest loads and variables from the questionnaires. The difference in activation between loads in the left parietal cortex partially mediated the association between parent-reported stressful life events and VWM performance. Critically, our findings show that the association between VWM capacity, left parietal activation and indicators of life stress is important to understand the nature of individual differences in VWM in pre-school children.
Highlights
Visual working memory (VWM) is a short-term storage system responsible for detecting changes in the world as they occur
We found that the difference in activation between loads in the left parietal cortex was positively correlated with the life stress subscore from the Parenting Stress Index (r = 0.293, p =.011, see Figure 9)
We found that the difference in activation between loads in the left parietal cortex partially mediated the relationship between life stress and maximum K
Summary
Visual working memory (VWM) is a short-term storage system responsible for detecting changes in the world as they occur. VWM capacity is reliably predictive of cognitive functions (Fukuda et al, 2010) and a host of academic skills (Alloway & Alloway, 2010; Bull & Scerif, 2001; Gathercole et al, 2004; Swanson & Beebe- Frankenberger, 2004). A common task for assessing VWM is the change-detection task (Luck & Vogel, 1997), where subjects are consecutively presented two arrays of items and asked to identify if the items were identical across both arrays This task is well-suited for examining human development, as age-related changes in capacity can be captured by varying the number of presented items. This finding was confirmed by Buss et al (2014), who found that 3-year-old children had a capacity of 1.2 items while 4-year-old children had a capacity of 1.8 items when attending to a shape change detection task
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