Improving working memory abilities in individuals with Down syndrome: a treatment case study

Costa, HM, Purser, HRM ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3307-8421 and Passolunghi, MC, 2015. Improving working memory abilities in individuals with Down syndrome: a treatment case study. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, p. 1331. ISSN 1664-1078

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Abstract

Working memory (WM) skills of individuals with Down’s syndrome (DS) tend to be very poor compared to typically developing children of similar mental age. In particular,
research has found that in individuals with DS visuo-spatial WM is better preserved than verbal WM. This study investigated whether it is possible to train short-term memory (STM) and WM abilities in individuals with DS. The cases of two teenage children are reported: EH, 17 years and 3 months, and AS, 15 years and 11 months. A school-based treatment targeting visuo-spatial WM was given to EH and AS for six weeks. Both prior to and after the treatment, they completed a set of assessments to measure WM abilities and their performance was compared with younger typically developing non-verbal mental age controls. The results showed that the trained participants improved their performance in some of the trained and non-trained WM tasks proposed, especially with regard to the tasks assessing visuo-spatial WM abilities. These findings are discussed on the basis of their theoretical, educational, and clinical implications.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Frontiers in Psychology
Creators:	Costa, H.M., Purser, H.R.M. and Passolunghi, M.C.
Publisher:	Frontiers
Date:	10 September 2015
Volume:	6
ISSN:	1664-1078
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01331 DOI
Rights:	Copyright © 2015 Costa, Purser and Passolunghi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	14 Oct 2016 15:42
Last Modified:	09 Jun 2017 14:07
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/28860

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