Lucie Attout, PhD
Psychology and Neuroscience of cognition Research Unit Boulevard du Rectorat, B33, 4000 Liège BELGIUM e-mail: Lucie.attout@uliege.be
Behavioral studies have highlighted the importance of distinguishing item and serial order short-term memory (STM) components for studying the role of verbal STM in numerical development (Attout et al., 2014ab; 2015). These studies demonstrated that the serial order STM predicted calculation abilities one and two years later in kindergarten children but also that a deficit to process serial order information in STM was observed in children and adults with dyscalculia and this, in contrast to item STM. These data are in favor of a specific implication of serial order STM in calculation abilities.
Participants : 56 typically developping children (29 girls) aged from 7 to 12 years old (mean age = 9.16 yrs)
Contact Memory
set 4000 ms Retentioninterval ± 3000 ms
Probe 6000
ms
Item STM task
The specific role of serial order STM in calculation abilities: a
developmental functional neuroimaging study
Order STM task
Regions are displayed at p < .001, uncorrected , with a minimum cluster size of 15 voxels.
• Distinct processes between item and order STM were already present in children but with a progressive specialization of order STM at parietal level.
• The bilateral parietal ROI correlated positively with math fluency and this for order STM but not item STM
Behavioral results fMRI main effect – recognition phase Correlation between STM and math fluency
/not/ /ram/ /paj/ /cour/
/pat/ /pat/ : « The item was in the list ? »
For each list :
28 items monosyllabic words + 8 items baseline
/cour/ /paj/ : « Same order as in the list? »
The aim of this study was
to explore the
relationship between the
serial order STM neural
network and calculation
abilities in children.
This study shows that a specialized network supports serial order STM already in school-age children and that these specific areas are closely related to the developmental increase in calculation abilities.
-0,6 -0,4 -0,20 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,81 60 80 100 120 140 160 Parameter estimates
Math fluency scores
Bilateral IPS Left IPS Item STM Order STM 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 1 2 3 4 Err or ra te Position Item STM RT s (ms ) Err or rate 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 1_2 2_3 3_4 Err or ra te Position exchange Order STM RT s (ms ) Err or rate SMA IFG Right SFG -1 -0,5 0 0,5 1 60 80 100 120 140 160 Param eter est imates age (months)
Correlation age - Parietal ROI
r =.32 r =.09
r =.32 r =-.03 Right IPS
Math fluency test (additions,
subtractions, divisions, multiplications & mix)
TTR (De vos, 1998) 1+1=… 2+1=… 3+0=… 4+1=… 2+3=… …
