Verbal, visual, and spatio-sequential short-term memory: assessment of the storage capacities of children and teenagers with Down's syndrome.
Lean on spatial order, not spoken lists, when teaching kids with Down syndrome.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bhaumik et al. (2009) tested three kinds of short-term memory in children and teens with Down syndrome. They looked at verbal, visual, and spatio-sequential storage. Each child tried to remember spoken words, pictures, and the order of moving dots.
The team compared the Down syndrome group to kids of the same mental age without Down syndrome.
What they found
Verbal memory scores were clearly lower for the Down syndrome group. Spatio-sequential memory held up better and even beat mental-age peers. Simple visual span scores were the same between groups.
In short, spoken lists are hard, but remembering a sequence of places can be a strength.
How this fits with other research
Schertz et al. (2016) extends these results. They added a one-month delay and still found people with Down syndrome remember fewer actions and mess up the order more often.
Ratz (2013) shows the same verbal weakness in reading. A large survey of 190 students found the strongest reading stage at the alphabetic level. The author says to plan syllable-based lessons that do not lean on verbal short-term memory.
Meneghetti et al. (2018) seems to clash by reporting poor mental rotation, yet the current paper shows strong spatio-sequential memory. The tasks differ: rotating objects in the mind is not the same as recalling the order of places, so both can be true.
Why it matters
If you teach a learner with Down syndrome, swap spoken lists for visual or spatial formats. Lay picture cards left-to-right to show a sequence, or let the learner tap blocks in order while you say the steps. This taps their stronger spatio-sequential store and can boost recall of verbal content.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: It is recognized that individuals with Down's syndrome have a specific deficit in verbal short-term memory. On the other hand, non-verbal short-term memory seems to be preserved or even be a strong point for these persons. Nevertheless, the extent and specificity of the deficit must be determined. To do so, we carried out a research programme that allowed us to simultaneously assess various short-term memory systems in a developmental perspective, and to compare our participants' performance to that obtained by typically developing individuals of the same mental age. METHOD: Three span tasks are used (auditory word span/visual patterns test/Corsi blocks task) with 54 children and teenagers with Down's syndrome and 54 typically developing children as control group. Participants were matched according to their cognitive level. RESULTS: For the auditory word span task, participants with Down's syndrome obtained performances significantly lower than those of the typically developing participants. On the other hand, compared with typically developing children, children and teenagers with Down's syndrome have a spatio-sequential span significantly higher for the lowest developmental ages. No significant differences were found for visual span. CONCLUSIONS: Individuals with Down's syndrome exhibited a distinctive pattern of memory performance, in addition to their developmental specificities.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2009 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2008.01139.x