Investigating the central executive in adult dyslexics: Evidence from phonological and visuospatial working memory performance

James Hugo Smith-Spark · John E. Fisk · Angela J. Fawcett · Roderick I. Nicolson

120 citations0/0 files storedThe European Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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Reading and Literacy Development Cognitive Abilities and Testing Developmental and Educational Neuropsychology

Abstract

There is long-standing evidence for verbal working memory impairments in both children and adults with dyslexia. By contrast, spatial memory appears largely to be unimpaired. In an attempt to distinguish between phonological and central executive accounts of the impairments in working memory, a set of phonological and spatial working memory tasks was designed to investigate the key issues in working memory, task type, task demands (static, dynamic, and updating), and task complexity. Significant differences emerged between the dyslexic and nondyslexic participants on the verbal working memory tasks employed in Experiment 1, thereby providing further evidence for continuing dyslexic impairments of working memory into adulthood. The nature of the deficits suggested a problem with the phonological loop, with there being little evidence to implicate an impairment of the central executive. Due to the difficulties associated with separating verbal working memory and phonological processing, however, performance was investigated in Experiment 2 using visuospatial measures of working memory. The results of the visuospatial tasks indicated no between-group differences in static spatial memory, which requires the short-term storage of simultaneously presented information. In almost all conditions there were no between-group differences in dynamic spatial memory that demands the recall of both location and order of stimuli presented sequentially. However, a significant impairment occurred on the dynamic task under high memory updating load, on which dyslexic adults showed nonphonological working memory deficits. In the absence of an explanation involving verbal recoding, this finding is interpreted in terms of a central executive or automaticity impairment in dyslexia.

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2016Executive functions in adults with developmental dyslexia 2009Can the Error Detection Mechanism Benefit from Training the Working Memory? A Comparison between Dyslexics and Controls — An ERP Study 2010Executive working memory processes in dyslexia: Behavioral and fMRI evidence 2012Evidence for a Specific Impairment of Serial Order Short‐term Memory in Dyslexic Children 2009Sentence comprehension in young adults with developmental dyslexia

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