The neuronal processes underlying reasoning and the related working memory subsystems were examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Twelve volunteers solved relational reasoning problems which either supported a single (determinate) or several alternative solutions (indeterminate). In a second condition, participants maintained the identical premises of these problems in work...

This study investigates the development of landmark and route knowledge in complex wayfinding situations. It focuses on how children (aged 6, 8, and 10 years) and young adults (n = 79) indicate, recognize, and bind landmarks and directions in both verbal and visuo-spatial tasks after learning a virtual route. Performance in these tasks is also related to general verbal and visuo-spatial abiliti...

Several authors have hypothesized that visuo-spatial working memory is functionally analogous to verbal working memory. Irrelevant background speech impairs verbal short-term memory. We investigated whether irrelevant visual information has an analogous effect on visual short-term memory, using a dynamic visual noise (DVN) technique known to disrupt visual imagery (Quinn & McConnell, 1996b). Ex...

Persons with intellectual disability (ID) have been found to perform more poorly than their mental age would suggest in the visuo-spatial problem solving task Tower of Hanoi (TOH). Inefficient performance has been assumed to be related to inability to use sophisticated problem solving strategies because of restricted working memory capacity. In the present study, the TOH performance of adult pe...

We determined how various cognitive abilities, including several measures of a proposed domain-specific number sense, relate to mathematical competence in nearly 100 9-year-old children with normal reading skill. Results are consistent with an extended number processing network and suggest that important processing nodes of this network are phonological processing, verbal knowledge, visuo-spati...

Smoking prevalence in schizophrenia is significantly elevated relative to other clinical and to non-clinical groups. The cognitive self-medication hypothesis attributes this to the beneficial effects of nicotine on illness-related cognitive deficits. Significant effects of nicotine have been observed on visual spatial working memory (VSWM), sustained attention (Continuous Performance Test - Ide...

Working memory theories often include domain-specific verbal and visual stores (e.g., the phonological and visuo-spatial buffers of Baddeley, 1986), and some also posit more general stores thought to be capable of holding verbal or visuo-spatial materials (Baddeley, 2000; Cowan, 2005). However, it is currently unclear which type of store is primarily responsible for maintaining objects that inc...

We piloted a computer program to train working memory for children with attention problems or hyperactivity who attended an urban public school serving economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Training was conducted daily for 5 weeks during school hours. Teachers rated children’s behaviors before and after the intervention, and standardized assessments of verbal and visuo-spatial working memor...

This study investigates the development of visuo-spatial memory in school-aged children, as measured by the Nine Box Maze Test Child Version (NBMT-CV). This task, originally developed for adults by, utilises an allocentric framework to assess the complexities of spatial memory. Sixty children participated in this study (aged 5-12 years), which also involved administration of traditional 'non-ve...