6. Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (Contemp study) Flashcards
(14 cards)
Sebastian: Aim
- Investigate development of phonological loop of WM in children aged 5-17 using verbal digit span
- Confirm/ compare findings of studies with English participants (digit span increases with age then levels off at 15)
- Compare Spanish school children with English elderly adults and people with dementia from previous study
Procedure: sample
- 570 volunteers from pre-primary and secondary (public & private) schools in Madrid
- All native spanish
- Between 5 - 17 years old
Procedure: variables and controls
IV: Year of schooling/ age
DV: Verbal digit span (longest sequence child could recall, 2/3 presented, in order without error)
Controls:
- Impairments in hearing/ reading/ writing
- Practice sequence to begin
- 1 digit read aloud to participants per second
- 3 trials each
Procedure: setting, groups, etc
- Tested individually at break time
- Participants divided into 5 age groups and avg digit span recorded for each age group
Results
Results
- Preschool children: 3.76 (mean)
- 11 years: 5.28 (“)
- 17 year olds: 5.91 (“)
- Native Spanish children of 5/6 years old had shorter digit spans than elderly English participants but no differences in older children
- Dementia participant’s scores similar to healthy elderly adults
- Scores of 9 patients with frontal variant frontotemporal dementia (fvFTD) matched scores of pre-school children
Conclusion
- Digit span increases with age up to adolescence (around 15 in English children but 17 in Spanish kids)
- Avg digit span of native Spanish participants lower than English participants (possibly due to word length effect associated with digits)
- But word length effect begins when kids start to subvocalise at 7 years old therefore participants younger than 7 showed no difference between Spanish and English scores
- Dementia group demonstrated that the capacity of phonological loop affected more by age than dementia
What is the word length effect?
- It takes more time to repeat and rehearse longer words
- Spanish takes more time as words longer therefore take up more space in PL resulting in shorter digit span
Generalisability
+ Large sample size with wide range of ages therefore results more likely to be representative of target population
- One of the samples was very small (only 9 fvFTD) making a Type 1 error more likely due to the reduced power of statistical tests therefore study may not have enough statistical power to reject null hypothesis, putting conclusions on PL in question
- Ethnocentric as all native Spanish, could investigate various cultures
Reliability
+ Standardised procedures (ie: digits read at 1 per second) meaning all participants had same experiences
+ This makes the procedure replicable across other cultures
+ Findings agree with the English participant results with both following a similar pattern
+ Findings agree with WISC data
Application
+ Can be used to help understand real-life cognitive skills (ie: short digit span linked to dyslexia and longer digit span linked to intelligence and better readers)
- Doesn’t show when the decrease might start therefore difficult to know when to intervene to help memory
Validity
+ Internal validity high due to great control of extraneous variables ( 1 second per digit, 3 trials each)
+ Participants tested in own language
+ High ecological validity due to natural environment
+ Excluded participants with difficulties (learning, hearing reading, writing) due to their possible effect on digit span
- Low mundane realism and task validity due to the nature of the task
- Lack of controls: researchers didn’t test for impairments instead relying on children/ parent info
Ethics
+ Parents gave informed consent
- However children themselves didn’t provide consent
+ No deception involved
- Vulnerable participants used (children and dementia patients)
Issues and Debates
+ WM does not appear to be culturally determined & differences instead appear to be from structural differences between languages
+ Researchers built on previous studies adding to the development of psychology over time
