Two summers ago, I volunteered at a special education academic program at the Weston High School in Weston, Massachusetts. As I observed the students work, I was astounded by how behind in learning their disabilities put them compared to the average level their age would normally be associated with. While I was there, I helped a 13-year-old blind girl with her reading comprehension homework. I was asked to dictate a passage to her, and she had to answer one of four questions that she read in brail. As I watched her fingers trace the dots, and dictate to me the correct answer, I was both astounded and intrigued. \u00a0I wondered and still wonder, how does the human body adapt and reorganize itself to compensate for deficits, by birth or by injury? More specifically, how can blindness affect one\u2019s cognitive abilities, in particular the various parts of the human memory?<\/p>\n
In a recent study (Withagen, A., Kappers, A. L., Vervloed, M. J., Knoors, H., & Verhoeven, L. (2013), researchers conducted one of the first experiments comparing both the working memory and the short-term memory of blind versus sighted children. The researchers chose two, clear research questions to focus on: 1) How do short-term memory and working memory abilities of blind versus sighted children differ 2) To what extent do the short-term memory and working memory abilities relate within the two groups of children? The researchers hypothesized that blind children would have short-term memories and working memories superior to those of the sighted children because of the brain\u2019s adaptation to a visual impairment. <\/ins><\/p>\n Conceptually, Short-term memory is a passive storage system with a small capacity and a short-duration. Working memory, which refers to a system that stores and rehearses information used to carry out cognitive tasks, contains the central executive, which regulates the cognitive processes, the phonological loop, which stores and rehearses verbal information, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, which stores and rehearses visual information, and the episodic buffer, which connects all the information together. Although the two systems are closely related, it is important to know their distinction from one another when testing the two systems because they are not the same! <\/ins><\/p>\n For testing STM, both the blind and sighted children performed the Digit Span Forward Test, in which the children had to repeat an increasing number of digits in order, the 15 Word Test For Children, in which the participants had to recall fifteen unrelated words read aloud, and the Learning Names task, in which the participants had to remember the names that various objects were paired with.<\/p>\n In order to test the children\u2019s\u2019 working memory, the researchers made sure to provide more complex tasks that would contain both the memory and processing elements of the working memory. They hoped that these tasks would distinguish this study from previous studies, where working memory wasn\u2019t differentiated from short-term memory. In the Listening Span Task, the children had to listen to sentences out loud, repeat the last words, and then determine whether the sentences were true or false. In the Working Memory Digit Span Backward Task, the participants had to listen to digits and be able to repeat them backwards.<\/p>\n The results of the study confirmed the researchers\u2019 hypothesis that blind children have superior working memories and short-term memories to sighted children. How does this superiority come to be? The results confirm previous theories that the brain reorganizes itself to account for the absence of vision. Because blind people can\u2019t use visual stimuli for recognition and identification, they have to use alternative methods for navigating the world. Therefore, they must develop different strategies to make up for the absence of vision. As a result, they are using their memory more often than sighted people because they have a larger dependency on memory in everyday life. On a more general level, I would imagine that people with various deficits have to compensate in similar ways to blind people have to. I would be interested to know what type of memory compensations people are deaf have to make.<\/p>\n \u00a0Withagen, A., Kappers, A. L., Vervloed, M. J., Knoors, H., & Verhoeven, L. (2013). Short term memory and working memory in blind versus sighted children.\u00a0<\/a>Research In Developmental Disabilities<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0<\/a>34<\/i><\/a>(7), 2161-2172. doi:10.1016\/j.ridd.2013.03.028<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two summers ago, I volunteered at a special education academic program at the Weston High School in Weston, Massachusetts. As I observed the students work, I was astounded by how behind in learning their disabilities put them compared to the average level their age would normally be associated with. While I was there, I helped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4852,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[313,80215],"tags":[370822,130408,130377],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4852"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3781,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions\/3781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}