Development of children’s working memory and executive function skills

 

·        One of the problems that arose from our studies examining the role of executive functioning in children’s mathematics was that there were very few well defined measures of executive functioning that could be used with preschool children.  This has resulted in a series of studies examining the specific task demands of a number of more complex EF tasks, e.g., DCCS, Tower tasks, the Shape School, and the Day/Night Stroop task, and the development of new measures of executive functioning.  We are hoping that this will provide us with a better understanding of what children’s specific cognitive difficulties are when they appear to have problems with such tasks, and also how these skills support other everyday social and academic functions.

 

 

  • Visual-spatial cognition.  Part of my research examining the development of children’s maths skills has focussed on visual-spatial working memory.  One of the problems interpreting the findings of this research is that tasks traditionally used to assess visual and spatial working memory are not specifically defined and generally involve complex executive resources.  A dual-tasking which began in May 2006 (just completed) examined newly developed tasks of visual and spatial memory and methods by which such skills can be selectively disrupted.  Collaborators on this project are Dr. David Pearson (Aberdeen) and Dr. Colin Hamilton (Northumbria), and Wendy Davidson is the RA .  The research is funded by the ESRC.

 

 

·        Funding: ESRC, British Academy.

 

 

  • Collaborators: Dr. Kimberly Espy (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Dr. David Pearson (Aberdeen), Dr. Colin Hamilton (University of Northumbria)

 

 

  • Associated papers:

 

 

Espy, K. A., Bull, R., Kaiser, H., Martin, J., & Benet, M.  (in press, 2007).  Methodological and conceptual issues in understanding the development of executive control in the preschool period.  In V. Anderson, R. Jacobs, & P. Anderson (Eds.), Executive functions and the frontal lobes: A lifespan perspective.  Psychology Press

 

Espy, K. A., Bull, R., & Martin, J., & Stroup, W. (2006).  Measuring the development of executive control with the Shape School.  Psychological Assessment, 18, 373-381.

 

Espy, K. A., & Bull, R (2005).  Inhibitory processes in young children and individual variation in short-term memory.  Developmental Neuropsychology, 28, 669-688.

 

Bull, R., Espy, K. A., & Senn, T. E (2004). A comparison of performance on the Towers of London and Hanoi in young children.  Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45, 743-754.

 

Rennie, D., Bull, R., & Diamond, A. (2004).  Executive functioning in preschoolers: Reducing the inhibitory demands of the dimensional change card sort task.  Developmental Neuropsychology, 26, 423-443.