Working Memory and Fluid Intelligence in Young Children.

By Pascale Engel de Abreu, Andrew R. A. Conway, Susan E. Gathercole *. 2010

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The present study investigates how working memory and fluid intelligence are related in young children and how these links develop over time. The major aim is to determine which aspect of the working memory system—short-term storage or cognitive control—drives the relationship with fluid intelligence. A sample of 119 children was followed from kindergarten to second grade and completed multiple assessments of working memory, short-term memory, and fluid intelligence. The data showed that working memory, short-term memory, and fluid intelligence were highly related but separate constructs in young children. The results further showed that when the common variance between working memory and short-term memory was controlled, the residual working memory factor manifested significant links with fluid intelligence whereas the residual short-term memory factor did not. These findings suggest that in young children cognitive control mechanisms rather than the storage component of working memory span tasks are the source of their link with fluid intelligence.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b545ed2b88d44f4bde56bc48329c73c564c2d56a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Executive and phonological processes in second-language acquisition. (2012, methodology): “The order in which the latent predictors were entered into the analyses was determined by the specific pattern of loadings of the first-order onto the second-order factors (for more information on this statistical procedure see Engel de Abreu et al., 2010).”
Robotics in the early childhood classroom: learning outcomes from an 8-week robotics curriculum in pre-kindergarten through second grade (2015, background): “Working memory is described as a system for holding and manipulating information over brief periods of time (Abreu et al. 2010).”
Is working memory training effective? (2012, background): “By kindergarten, WM capacity is predictive of Gf (Engel de Abreu et al., 2010), and individual differences in WM capacity predict children's verbal and mathematical aptitude (Cowan et al., 2005; Gathercole & Pickering, 2000; Swanson & Beebe-Frankenberger, 2004).”
Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm (2011, background): “In fact, Engel de Abreu et al. (2010) showed that cognitive control mechanisms, rather than storage as such, are the source of the link between working memory and fluid intelligence.”
Disentangling the relationship between working memory and language: The roles of short-term storage and cognitive control (2011, methodology): “…the simple span residual should represent short-term storage whereas the complex span residual is suggested to mainly reflect mechanisms of cognitive control Working memory, and language 12 (Conway, Cowan, Bunting, Therriaut, & Minkoff, 2002; Engel de Abreu et al., 2010; Engle et al., 1999).”