Developmental trajectories of spatial-sequential and spatial-simultaneous working memory in Down syndrome.
B Carretti, C Meneghetti, E Doerr and 2 others
PMID 34859907WHAT IT FOUND
People with Down syndrome remembered spatial locations better when shown one after another than when shown all at once.
Their spatial working memory rose during childhood, then flattened, but this was not a treatment study.
Key findings
01In both the Down syndrome group and the typically developing group, spatial-sequential working memory scores were higher than spatial-simultaneous scores.
02For participants with Down syndrome, segmented models placed a change point at age 13.67 years for spatial-sequential memory and age 13.50 years for spatial-simultaneous memory.
03When spatial-sequential working memory was plotted against verbal developmental level, it increased similarly in the Down syndrome and typically developing groups.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study was cross-sectional, so it compared different people at different ages rather than following the same people over time. The Down syndrome and typically developing groups had different chronological age ranges, and the paper did not directly compare the two groups on the working-memory tasks because of differences in group size and mean developmental level. Few participants with Down syndrome were older than 20 years: 11 were aged 20 to 25 and 9 were aged 25 to 30, so the adult trajectory is less secure. For the Down syndrome group, the segmented models fitted better than simpler models, but the slopes after the change points were not statistically significant, so the plateau is not a strong demonstration of change. The typically developing sequential-memory task showed a change point that may reflect a ceiling effect rather than true developmental change. Participants were selected from previous studies and unpublished data, not from a single new sample.
Declared interests
No external funding was received, and the authors declared no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the change points at age 13.67 years and age 13.50 years as proof that spatial working memory cannot improve later. The study was cross-sectional, had few older participants, and did not test an intervention.