A specific deficit in visuospatial simultaneous working memory in Down syndrome.
People with Down syndrome struggle to hold several pictures in mind at once, even when their verbal skills match younger kids.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave visuospatial working-memory tasks to people with Down syndrome. They compared scores to kids who matched them in verbal mental age.
Tasks showed dots or pictures all at once. Kids had to remember the whole set, not the order.
What they found
Down syndrome group scored lower on every simultaneous task. Verbal mental age alone did not fix the gap.
The trouble is specific to holding many items at once in the mind's eye.
How this fits with other research
Hong et al. (2021) pooled 57 studies and found the same visuospatial weakness. Their big meta puts the 2009 result inside a wider executive-function map.
Rigoldi et al. (2011) link the same memory gap to reading problems. If you boost working memory, text understanding may rise too.
Costanzo et al. (2013) show shifting and verbal inhibition also lag in Down syndrome. Visuospatial memory is just one piece of a larger EF puzzle.
Why it matters
Screen for simultaneous visuospatial memory before you teach multi-step tasks. Use short arrays, clear space, and few items on screen. Pair new skills with verbal labels to give an extra cue. Target EF directly; do not wait for it to grow on its own.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Recent studies have demonstrated that individuals with Down syndrome (DS) present both central and verbal working memory deficits compared with controls matched for mental age, whereas evidence on visuospatial working memory (VSWM) has remained ambiguous. The present paper uses a battery of VSWM tasks to test the hypothesis that individuals with DS can also encounter specific difficulties in VSWM. METHOD: Four tasks were administered to 34 children and adolescents with DS and 34 controls matched for verbal mental age. In two of these tasks, participants had to remember a series of locations sequentially presented on a matrix (spatial-sequential WM); in another two, they had to remember locations simultaneously presented (spatial-simultaneous WM). RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Results showed that individuals with DS are poorer than controls in the spatial-simultaneous tasks, but not in the spatial-sequential tasks. These findings were not due to a difference in speed of visuospatial processing. In fact, when performances of the two groups in VSWM were compared using speed measures as covariates, differences between groups remained. It is suggested that the simultaneous VSWM deficit of individuals with DS could be due to the request for processing more than one item at a time.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2009 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2009.01165.x