With all the research on the importance of working memory to high achievement I find it interesting that WM is sometimes considered of secondary importance on this board. (i.e. statements like "GAI is a better measure of giftedness"). Processing speed I can understand why it may be secondary, but working memory??? Please help me understand.

Ul.H.

It may be because the board attracts a high % of kids who are 2E or 2E-ish, or who are clearly gifted but not fitting into the school "box" all that well. My DD didn't take an IQ test that measured WM, but hers is clearly very good (I posted in another thread about her digit span, which is better than mine). She's also (so far) cruising through school at a gifted magnet.

That said, I feel like I have read this other places as well. It seems to be a useful puzzle piece to have, however.

Just guessing, but maybe (like processing speed) it's easier to remediate than other aspects of IQ? E.g., maybe someone with low working memory will do as well on a maths problem as someone with high WM, provided paper is available? In which case, it's interesting that one of them needs paper while the other doesn't, but not really very important in many circs.

I don't think that it's generally considered to be unimportant. Discussions about GAI tend to arise with respect to meeting threshold scores for entry to a gifted program. Some other parents seem to want primarily to present their children to best effect (for want of a better term), but to me this seems minimal by comparison with the desire for access to services.

Informationally, the GAI of course doesn't add anything when the subtest scores are available; one can then see the lower working memory and processing speed coupled with higher scores in other areas that would make the GAI useful to calculate. One thus might fairly conclude that presentation of a GAI with the subtest scores implies a tendency to disregard low working memory as unimportant, except that some testers will generate the GAI as a matter of course when indicated, and a parent might just be reporting the information they were given.

I agree with ColinsMum that aids as simple as pencil and paper, plus good organizational skills, can compensate a great deal for a relatively weak working memory. I still think the effects of a relatively weak working memory will be felt some of the time-- in my opinion a person will tend to have fewer or at least less deep or complex flashes of insight under those conditions. Basically, anything where it's useful to hold many things at once in one's head would be impacted. I know this is not a revelation.

I confess that I have only a very surface comprehension of this concept. The Wikipedia entry is pretty interesting, although I'm not positive they're using the term in exactly the same way we do.



I don't know how controversial any of this is or anything. I know that DD's excellent WM seems to give her an advantage over and beyond the gifted stuff-for instance, she has no difficulty with math facts or spelling, which seem to be relatively common stumbling blocks even among the highly intelligent kids here. It was one of the first things we noticed about her as a baby--it set her apart at an early age. Interestingly, though, there is one memory-related thing she is not so good at, and that's remembering and following through on a long string of verbal directions. She can parrot back a long quote, but something about "Listen to this AND GO DO this" must be different. (I don't think this is just her being obstinate.)

I have two sons who have very similar WISC-IV profiles except in the area of working memory. My younger son's WMI is about 40 points higher than the older son's. Their PSI scores are the same and quite a bit below average.

I'm sure there are other differences (one being the older one has dyslexia and the younger one doesn't), but the difference in their ability to learn is like night and day. The younger one is very much more obviously gifted.

I have poor working memory when tested (below average), but am known for "flashes of insight." The difference is that testing uses novel info, and y "insights" rely on learned info. I *don't* learn fast. But once I've learned something, I can manipulate complex models easily and in my head.

I think maybe thisjust isn't really very well understood.

Paper and pencil help a lot. Now, someone go tell DH that. He's forever making verbal lists and expecting me to remember what's on them.

(oh, I'm 2e, incidentaly)

I'm curious where the concern stems from - is it a concern that GAI isn't valid or relevant or that if working memory has deficits no matter how high the IQ, that one cannot be gifted? I'm a bit confused by the question and would love to hear more about your concerns.

I'd tend to say that it is b/c VCI and PRI measure aspects of intelligence that are more salient to giftedness whereas WMI and PSI measure processing skills that enable one to perform well in school. I've seen kids with high PSI and/or WMI and average VCI/PRI who are very high achievers in school, but who lack the kind of depth and abstractions that I associate with giftedness.

I've also seen kids with very high VCI/PRI and lower WMI and/or PSI who may not always appear to be the types of kids who get ided as gifted in schools (not convergent consistent high achievers), but who are clearly gifted.

I, too, think that having high WMI (and high PSI for that matter) are truly helpful in a school setting and probably in life in general, but I also think that they aren't the things that make one gifted.

I will respectfully disagree with the thought that "the younger one is very much more obviously gifted" simply based on his higher working memory score (please know I'm not picking apart what you've said Kai! And obviously I've never met your sons :)). Among my kids, my EG ds has a relatively low score on WM (I don't remember how much lower than his other scores), as well as a very large dip in processing speed relative to VIQ and PRI. My HG dd, otoh, has incredibly high scores on WM and processing speed - *really really high scores*. She absolutely is fast as can be with spitting out answers, memorizing math facts, computing math equations, answering questions, learning new concepts when taught something. She's a high achiever in school, and she's the type of kid that teachers etc tend to absolutely love and think of as classically "gifted". She *doesn't*, however, come up with the same amazing deep insights and out-of-the-box type reasoning that our EG ds does. Yes, ds doesn't move quickly, he doesn't spell well and he will never win a math-facts race... but the depth and type of insight he has is absolutely and profoundly gifted. I think that even with IQ there are multiple ways in which a person can be "gifted".

Why working memory tends to be de-emphasized here? I definitely see a trend here on these boards of lower WM scores relative to VIQ/PRI - which I think, as mentioned above, may be due to folks with 2e kiddos being on the internet searching for advice etc where parents of non-2e gifted kids might more often than not be sailing through life without needing to post online - perhaps. I also am sure I've read that the profile of relatively low WM and PS relative to VIQ and PRI is somewhat common in kids who score in the HG-PG range on the WISC rather than the other way around (higher WM and PS). In my completely unqualified point of view - high WM and PS give a person great tools to manipulate knowledge and pick up facts quickly, but it's high VIQ/PRI that give a person the ability to generate novel, unique, insightful, creative *new* ideas... and the ability to do that isn't dependent on doing it quickly or while doing 18 other things.

However, that's just me speaking from my limited experience parenting my own quirky kids

polarbear

Is working memory just short-term memory? For instance, DD has a superior digit span, as I mentioned; however, she can also easily memorize entire play scripts, which have to be retained in long-term memory. She has great recall for all kinds of facts, like scientific names of plants, as well as stuff like geography and what types of clouds look like, which involves visual memory. She had to use all this memory stuff to be an early reader, too, I assume.

It seems to be that long-term memory HAS to be part of the package of giftedness, doesn't it? If you can't retain information, then you don't really present as gifted. Possibly gifted with LDs. Short-term memory seems less relevant to me.

BTW, my own short-term memory is not very good. I have some weird holes in my math fact recall (for instance, I always used to have to do 8+4+1 to get to 8+5--it was not automatic) that, interestingly, have been somewhat remediated by doing math fact review with DD. (I wonder why this worked when years of doing math didn't??)

My question is purely one of curiosity, not concern.

I see WM as a core part of giftedness as we usually conceptualize it. I can think of very few fields or endeavors where working memory isn't essential for working at the highest level.

My DS6 scored higher on the GAI than FSIQ, and I feel like I'm cherry picking scores by considering the GAI his 'true' IQ.

Thanks, Ultralight Hiker. Now I understand.

Sometimes deficits in working memory simply need learned workarounds in order to perform at the highest level. My spouse is profoundly gifted (ceilinged somewhere above 185), but he can't remember his times tables or numbers in a problem. But he can add up and down from the few times tables he does remember with more speed than I can use a calculator.

My youngest has severe working memory issues, and it has depressed his IQ scores where he doesn't qualify for gifted classes, but he has all the same traits as his father and siblings.

His older brother has no working memory issues and does have a much easier time with IQ tests, but he doesn't come up with as many way outside the box solutions as his younger brother who can't qualify.

I'm not sold that WM is a necessary component to be gifted, but I am likely in the minority.

Yes, working memory is just short term memory. It would be interesting to know (but I won't google it as I'm supposed to be doing something else!) to what extent WM is correlated with ease of memorising things long term. My guess is not much (meaning not more, or not much more, than any of the other IQ indices are correlated with good long term memory), but I agree with you that long-term memory appears to be part of the package of giftedness, in the sense that many people identified as gifted do have very good long-term memory, and in that it is clear that (even in this google era) long-term memory is important. It may be that it's particularly important to children in helping them to be *identified* as gifted, in which case we should maybe be careful about it? For example, like your DD, my DS has always had a phenomenal memory, and I am also sure that this was important to his early reading. Once you have memorised what a story says word for word, you have as long as you like to puzzle over the squiggles on the page and compare them with what you know they say, as you break the code... If you couldn't remember exactly what they said, you'd find that process a lot harder.

I have to agree.

I'll add, here, that I am a reasonably proficient physical scientist and that I have a MAJOR hole in my working memory in a functional sense. I can't hold more than three digits in my working memory.

Truly.

I have to use long-term memory for things like phone numbers, account numbers, etc. Now, once I have that information in long term memory, then I can play with it at will and my recall pretty much NEVER goes away. I can remember every phone number I've had since I was five, every address, every zip code, etc. But I can't dial a seven-digit-- nevermind a ten-digit-- phone number without referring back to the written number at least once, usually twice.

Math facts were hellish for me, personally, as a timed-test exercise in school. Just a seemingly impossible/pointless task that seemed aimed at destroying my self-esteem and any thought that I might be "good at math." I was a real shock to teachers in a split 3rd/4th classroom that introduced a geometry "pullout" for the 4th graders.... when as a 'not-particularly-mathy' 3rd grade me ran circles around all of the 4th graders and quickly outstripped the teacher's expertise, too. Kind of wish that they'd have mentioned that before I incorporated "crappy at math" into my self-image. That would have saved me a lot of years of grief later.

ANYway...

I say that because my working memory is otherwise not that great for some kinds of information, and distinctly average for others, and yet...

extraordinary for yet others. (I have that freakish, savant-type short-term and working memory for colors. While an interesting and sometimes convenient parlor trick, it's little more in my life since I'm not an artist or designer.) Having conversed with a few people that have similar recall for numbers, most of them feel similarly. It's not really that useful, working memory, without the faster processor to go with it.


I do not believe that a single evaluation can shed light on "working memory" in any way which is meaningful functionally. It's too dependent on the nature of the input. I have very good working memory for some types of input, and very poor working memory with others. I do not have any learning disability to account for this discrepancy.

I also disagree that good working memory is necessary for working at high level in a subject. I have seen far too many examples where that is very very clearly not the case. Including Nobel and Fields winners. They may have areas of prodigious ability in working memory, but not necessarily. Some of them really are "I have to write it down or I'll lose it" types, and occasionally even 'globally' so, including their area of expertise.

Michaela is right, here, in my opinion; I don't think that WM is all that well understood, and I suspect that the theoretical underpinnings have some flaws. This entire construct isn't very robust when one looks at how it works in pragmatic, uncontrolled settings.

Oh-- what I do think may be important to appearing gifted is the rate and ease of transition from short-term to long-term memory. Again, using myself as an example, I remember numbers which I use frequently. I have to work to put them into long-term memory, in other words.

Words, though? Not-so-much. Thus my spelling ability.

But my working memory for letters isn't that fabulous. Probably about average, I would guess. A string of characters and my span is about 7-9. That's better, note, than my digit span.

But nowhere near what it is for a WORD task of similar nature. I also have better short-term recall of musical notes, spatial information (yes, I was quite good at memorizing/manipulating information in advanced organic chemistry and instrumental analysis), or color.

I think that any single type of evaluation of WM is probably flawed in that it unfairly evaluates some people on the basis of an area of strength (I'd look... probably off the charts at a COLOR task... and most people wouldn't)... and others on the basis of an area of relative weakness (me with digits) due to differences in the nature of the information in the task.


Not all visual, auditory, or sensory information is processed using the same "intake" centers in the brain. I don't think that there is just one type of "working memory" in the first place.

I accept that working memory may not be clearly understood (at least by us ) but if it is what you can hold in your head while you work on a problem or something similar (regardless of the model) I don't see it as something that can be compensated for completely by a good long-term memory or by use of external aids. Sure, one can become a problem domain expert by salting away a lot of knowledge long-term so that it's easy to recall; but still, one's thoughts about the pieces of that long-term knowledge that are relevant to the current problem are going to be created and manipulated in working memory. The working memory capacity is a limit on the number of co-thinkable things.

For me this means that for certain types of problems, which involve lots of parts that are best considered together, working memory is still important. Could one approach the same results by writing and rewriting things on paper, keeping them in front of one's face while working on the problem, etc.? Sometimes, but I don't think all the time, due to the pushing-in/pushing-out problem. Problems which can be done just as well with external aids would be the ones where the maximum number of things that must be considered at once all fit into working memory; the external aids would just preserve the state of one's work on the problem and its subparts until it was revisited.

I would tend to agree with this idea. It seems to be more than remembering a list of digits.

Here's what the Wikipedia says about working memory:


It seems reasonable to think that people with good working memory as defined above would have an advantage when doing word problems or when trying to solve a thorny problems involving a lot of factors. These tasks involve identifying important information and ideas that you've known for a longer time, holding them separately (presumably in your working memory), and relating them to new information. If you can do this in your head at one time and then manipulate the information in your mind to find new relationships, you probably have an advantage over someone who has to write stuff down (because you're constantly drawing on information in your mind and adding and removing ideas from memory. This is hard to duplicate on paper).

The ability to hold a series of numbers in one's head while working a problem is different that being able to mentally assess and manipulate multiple pieces to a problem in one's head, and it isn't clear that both require the same frontal lobe access to the brain. Many dyslexics have frontal lobe issues that affect working memory but are excellent at "3-D" thinking. The 2E folks in my home are amazing at 3-D thinking but not at idling numbers in their head. That is partially why I think the concept of working memory determining giftedness isn't an absolute or accurate.

Helpful, yes. Necessary? No.

I just want to clarify that I don't mean that the younger one is more gifted than the older one, just that his giftedness is more obvious. I also don't think that the WMI score is the only reason for the difference, but I do think that the younger one's working memory is extremely helpful to him.

http://www.uel.ac.uk/studentservices/supportingyou/staff/dyspraxia.htm

Working/Short Term Memory- the information processing stage where sounds or symbols are temporarily stored (short term) or manipulated (working) before being discarded or transferred into long-term memory. This will lead to problems remembering sequences of instructions, forgetfulness, slow retrieval of information, recalling what they have just been told, following group discussions, going off on a tangent, mental calculations, being organised, managing time and, multi-tasking.

I have always had problems with these things when I had anxiety or a migraine or both. I think my son, who was diagnosed with dyspraxia might be the same way. He was tested when he was getting a migraine and was tired from not having slept well the night before because of the anxiety.

But it looks to me like his working memory is much better than mine. He is able to solve math problems with multiple steps with very little writing because he uses mental math and combines steps and somehow gets the right answer while I have to write out every step to get the answer.

He always did very well on games that required good visual working memory at home on his computer yet several years ago the OT who tested him said he needed to work on his visual memory. She also noticed that he was showing signs of anxiety. I asked her why he could see a word once and remember the spelling if he had a problem with visual memory and she said it was a different part of the brain. He is learning Kanji without any problem. He can retrieve information quickly and he can multi-task. He is lightening fast with jokes and puns but he also notices visual puns that I would never notice. He not only makes jokes but acts out his improv scenarios with his ability to mimic sounds, accents, mannerisms, etc. It looks to me like improv would require a good working memory.

He has no problems with sequencing and he can remember last minute changes in musical theater dances and do the performance without a problem without having practiced the changes.

He can very quickly tell you where every key is on a qwerty keyboard but he says he doesn't see it in his head. He has to imagine touching the keys. He does it so fast you would think that he can see it in his head. He is learning the dvorak keyboard now and can type high frequency words faster than on qwerty.

I just don't know. None of this makes sense to me.

Another random thought to toss out there - for a lot of us here with 2e kiddos, the "low" working memory score is relative to other very high subtest scores. So - our kids aren't necessarily working with a *truly* low working memory, but perhaps an average or slightly-above-average WM. I remember when our ds had his first neuropsych eval at 8 years old, his WM score came in at around the 75th percentile for his age group, his processing speed score which was around the 50-60th percentile and his WM score was higher but not anywhere near his VIQ/PRI scores. His neuropsych focused on the need for remediation/accommodations for factors impacting his processing speed, and I remember asking whether or not WM wasn't also something we needed to remediate/accommodate. Her answer was that his score, even though it wasn't up as stratospherically high as the VIQ/PRI, was still adequate and that WM was something that worked more like an on/off switch - either you have it or you don't... but an average or slightly-above-average WM was not an issue for a HG/EG/PG kid in and of itself. One gotcha there though is with some disabilities such as dysgraphia (which our ds has)... WM can get entirely consumed by something like the act of handwriting... otoh, it wouldn't matter for a dysgraphic if they had very little WM or were up in the 99.9th percentile - the act of handwriting would still consume it all and leave nothing over for other parts of the writing task.

So that's how I understand it in the one instance of being relative to my one child - which isn't much re understanding! But fwiw...

polarbear

Very well explained.

This is a really good point. I scored right in the average range for digit span on the tests here http://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/user/login/, but abysmally low on the test for directional memory (spatial span). (No surprise. I could get lost in a cardboard box. I definitely have some kind of LD or something. It's quite humbling.) My DD did better than I did on the spatial memory test, but I think she was in the average range, perhaps even slightly below average, whereas she was above average (for an adult) for digit span. I'd never say I have a good short-term memory. Right now it's probably at its worst ever; I'm on a med that causes brain fog. The only thing I have an unusual memory for is spelling--I'm in the "see a word once" camp.

I call it being directionally dyslexic. My navigational skill without maps is horrible.

I mix up digits sometimes too. Never letters. Only numbers. Weird. I love it when I do it to phone numbers.

However, my mapreading skills are great. I can use maps to get anywhere.

In the woods? Even if I've walked the same path a ton of times, I will get lost. That was always fun when that happened.

This is true for my son with dysgraphia. When he is allowed to type he writes very well.

I have a child who has moved from the 13th to 80-90th percentile for WM after 2.5yrs of intervention. It SHOWS. And her sister has an (SBV) WM score on the 99.8 or possibly 99.9th (can't remember - haha!). That gap also shows. There is not a doubt in my mind that WM matters. BUT, to me it's not what makes my kids thinking gifted. Performance, particularly at school, yes. And the crippling lack of it crippled my eldest's development and depressed her IQ (which is now rising again). But while I notice my second child learns facts (radically) faster than her older sister did at the same age it's the little thoughts that she shares in quiet moments that knock my socks off.

In the course of trying to remediate my eldest I have figured out that I myself have almost no visual WM to speak of, my auditory WM is much stronger. Which is pretty funny as I work in a visual field. I tend to believe that as long as one has "enough" WM (whereever that line in the sand may be) and coping mechanisms for one's weaker patches (if I am reading a list of numbers I will forget them instantly unless I make sure I "hear" them in my head as I read them) I don't know that a relative weakness in WM is a huge problem. My feeling is that those of us who have "enough" WM to match our intellect will naturally developing solutions for our weird gaps, naturally make use of our strengths and not really think about it that much. The ones with astonishing WM will stand out and the ones with really poor WM will not look as gifted as they are, or not look gifted at all, and likely have LDs at work... The question is much of a gap between reasoning ability and WM can a person tolerate and function like they have "enough".

It seems that 80-90th percentile is probably "enough" for my MG child. I think she has other issues that are a bigger problem for her than WM these days, which are not necessarily directly tied to WM but like dysgraphia maybe get tangled up in there a bit.

I was just thinking about this some more while doing some house work and chasing three sick kids. My child who shifted from the 13th to 80-90th, the various treatments we did definitely worked, but I think that part of the shift came from my trying a VSL spelling technique with her, which dramatically improved her spelling. I think she learned, through that process, to map her aural memory to her stronger visual memory (she's the opposite to me). I have learned to "hear" what I see if I need to remember it, I believe that she has learned to "see" what she hears in order to improve her recall.

I think that more working memory is always better, in terms of overall intelligence as well as enabling higher achievement. While I certainly wouldn't disagree that one doesn't need a high working memory score on a particular test to be gifted, it's obvious to me that any particular gifted person would be more gifted with more working memory. I really don't think it's the case that a person gives exactly the same output, only slower, than they would with substantially more working memory.

People simply aren't computers, which can compute the exact same output regardless of underlying storage mechanisms, though the working memory concept apparently came in part from thinking about the brain as similar to a computer. And while I certainly think that a person can work around limitations by use of external aids like paper, and highly effective people would almost all tend to do this to some extent, it just can't be true that a person's brain operates extended onto paper the way it does natively.

However, the more I look into this the more I feel that working memory probably isn't tested well at this point. I also don't think working memory is just short-term memory for recently input symbols, etc. I looked at the technical reports for the WISC out of curiosity as to the justification for considering memory for digit strings etc. to be a good measure for working memory overall, and found a major reliance on a study of performance by schizophrenics on a card-based test, with little further explanation. I looked up that study (it's available as a PDF) and didn't come away with an understanding of why (for example) digit span testing would be a good measure of overall working memory.

With evidence that working memory tests give very different results depending on the subject matter, I'd want to know much more before concluding that a low working memory score on a particular IQ test was an indication of overall working memory performance. I think that first-hand accounts of people manipulating complex models in their heads indicate good working memory of a certain type, regardless of subtest scores. This means to me that the working memory scores on IQ tests are best seen as possible indicators of learning disabilities, but are useless for determining giftedness (though I still think working memory in general is important to giftedness).

One question of mine is the extent to which one's memory characteristics guide one's choice of activities (this idea is ripped off from another recent thread). Engineers might have working memory highly tuned for visual spatial manipulations, etc. Another question of mine is the extent to which certain functions or parts of working memory deal with retrieval and manipulation of information from long-term memory, and which other ones-- which might tend to be the ones more affected by learning disabilities on testing-- deal more with external input. Or, if that's a stupid question, what measures might be taken to minimize the impact of learning disabilities on input during working memory testing?

I think it would be interesting and very valuable to test working memory regarding a problem domain with which the testee was very familiar. That sort of testing might never show up on a general IQ test, as it's too individual-specific. However, I'd bet that even though working memory can highly influence intelligence (I'm convinced of this) any domain-specific working memory effects would tend to show up more on achievement tests, especially timed ones, except of course that they'd not be obvious.

Just another thought about working memory; maybe somebody who is more knowledgeable about these tests can fill in the blanks, but our DD was tested on SBV several years ago and got a non-verbal WM subtest score of 10 but a verbal WM score of 18. Her overall WMI ended up at ~120. She was retested this year with WISC-IV and the subtest scores in the WM category were 16 and 17, so her overall WMI was over 130, which in my opinion is a pretty big difference as well. I asked the psychologist about it and she said one of the tests used a verbal measure and the other used a non-verbal (must have been WISC-IV is more verbal? while SB-V includes non-verbal? whatever that means...). Which adds to the continuing questions I have about how these tests purport to measure things. But anyway, especially if you have a 2e-ish kid, it might be worth looking into different tests and asking about what they're actually measuring.

I'm interested in the idea that WM could be improved. I'd really like to improve my spatial working memory. It's truly a handicap. Like Dude, I can navigate from maps, although I am not fantastic at it. (I'm average at it, I think.) But I literally can get turned around in an instant--my brain just doesn't seem to retain spatial information. I also have mild face blindness, which must be memory-based as well. Both these things are socially awkward and embarrassing. I've wondered if I could get any better at this stuff using the various brain training programs that are out there. My husband, who has a very even profile and is very globally gifted, did not use to believe me when I admitted total ignorance of where places were and didn't recognize people. I don't know why he thought I would fake it, but he just could not believe I would be this clueless. (OTOH, he is astonished by how fast I read and write.) My brain is really all over the place. Fortunately for them, my kids seem to have none of my scatter, although DD is maybe a little poor at face recognition.

The article

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/20/magazine/mind-secrets.html
Secrets of a Mind-Gamer: How I trained my brain and became a world-class memory athlete
by Joshua Foer
New York Times
February 15, 2011

may interest you.

Actually not really, as far as current understanding goes, I think. (I have moderate prospagnosia, or face blindness.) See e.g. http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm:
(my emphasis)

ETA: Ha, someone has just done the experiment that I have long wished for someone to do:
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/135/2/542.short
Full text free, and lots else, from this search.

As I wrote that, I thought it might be wrong. It FEELS like a memory hole--like I just can't remember faces. I have a migraine...what does that study say, in English? Do I recognize faces but am just not making the link to the name?

Lots of people do that, but that isn't prosopagnosia. Suppose you're walking down the street and someone you know walks by, and you look at them. Do you (a) become aware that this is someone you know (regardless of whether you recall their name, or anything about them) or (b) not feel anything different from how you'd feel if you'd never seen them before, so that you walk past oblivious unless they stop you? (b) is prosopagnosia. (a), which seems to be much more common, is "finding it hard to connect names with faces" or some such.

I think the short version of that paper is that they have evidence that (I don't get the impression they'd put it any stronger) developmental prosopagnosics (i.e. people with prosopagnosia they've always had, not as a result of head injury or something) correctly store and retrieve visual memories of faces, and even react differently to familiar than unfamiliar faces indicating that their brains must be somehow connecting the memory with the perception, but don't correctly ring the "aha!" bell that would make them consciously aware that a face should be familiar, and would start the process of trying to retrieve a name, etc.

I think that often times working memory doesn't have the wow factor. It makes academics and even tasks of daily living a breeze, but doesn't enable those flashes of brilliance that we associate with genius or lesser giftedness.

I have given the matter some thought and am actually in the camp that values working memory and thinks that it is as valid a measure of giftedness as perceptual reasoning and verbal comprehension. However, I have to say that I was surprised that DD's working memory abililities were higher than those of DS just because he is my more advanced child; but on reflection, it did make sense as everything is always so easy for DD. Of course, I am comparing high versus very high and there may be a threshold beyond average where it's not an issue.

About a decade later... a new report on a study regarding prosopagnosia (face blindness) - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230227132443.htm