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.
