Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Working memory - why is it deemphasized here?

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.