Nature of Procedural and Declarative Memory Systems in Children with Reading Difficulties-Initial Analysis Kuppuraj Sengottuvel1,Arpitha Vasudev 2, Michael T Ullman3 1
Post-Doctoral fellow, Oxford Study of Children’s Communication Impairments, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK,
[email protected] 2 Master student, Speech Language Pathology, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysore, India 3 Professor, Department of Neuroscience ,Georgetown University, The United States of America
Introduction
Tasks and Sessions
Declarative Learning and Consolidation
Recognition across sessions
Encoding
Neurobiological hypotheses attempting to tie memory deficits in children with Reading Difficulties (RD) to their literacy phenotype argues that RD’s have difficulties in their procedural memory (learning and consolidation) and have relative strengths in their declarative memory (learning and consolidation) (Nicolson et al. 2010). Ullman and Pullman (2015) extends this argument a bit further and claims that due to RD’s procedural attenuation their declarative system
By object type
might get overused thus resulting in enhanced declarative memory capacities in RD’s. Present study We examine the trade –off between procedural and declarative system in children with RD. If Ullman and Pullman are right, we must see that in typical readers (TR), procedural memory would predict their literacy. However, in RD, declarative memory would predict their literacy abilities. To this end, we explore the initial data and see if this proposed pattern emerge. Participants’ details (recruitment in progress)
TD n = 20 (10 boys); RD n = 18 (13 boys) .
All the participants had normal nonverbal abilities (confirmed by the Raven’s coloured progressive matrices ) and all the participants in the RD group had complaints of literacy difficulties and showed below par reading and spelling difficulties on their second language (i.e., English) (assessed by DAPIC, Kuppuraj and Shanbal, 2010).
Data Exploration Procedural Learning and Consolidation
Acknowledgement We would like to thank Vishnupriya Mohan for helping us with data collection. The second author is funded by The Royal Society’s Newton International fellowship. Authors also thank Dr. Sayako Earle for their suggestions in development of this work.
Suggested Readings Ullman and Pullman (2015). A compensatory role for Declarative memory in neurodevelopmental disorders, NeuroSci.Biobehav.Rev Nicolson et al (2010). Procedural learning and Dyslexia. Dyslexia. For details of the tasks used Kuppuraj S, Rao P, Bishop DVM (2016). Declarative capacity does not trade-off with procedural capacity in children with specific language impairment. Autism Dev Lang Impair.
