Verbal and spatial immediate memory span: Normative data from 1355 adults and 1112 children

Abstract

Norms are provided for verbal and visuo-spatial immediate memory span, two tasks widely used in the clinical assessment of short-term memory and its neurological disorders. Data have been collected from 1355 male and female adult subjects, with various educational backgrounds and a 20-99 years age range. Span shows a major decrement after the late sixties and is affected by educational level. Male subjects score better on the spatial task. Data collected from 1112 male and female children, 4-to-10 year-old, show that span increases with age and boys score better on the spatial test.

The Development of Working Memory: Exploring the Complementarity of Two Models

“…The number of elements that could be processed simultaneously in the Corsi blocks task, however, was somewhat higher than would be expected on the basis of Pascual-Leone's model. Several studies on the development of spatial memory span have in fact reported similar span scores (Hitch et al, 1989a;Logie & Pearson, 1997;Orsini et al, 1987;Orsini, Schiappa, & Grossi, 1981). Nevertheless, performance was largely consistent with the developmental step curves proposed by Pascual-Leone.…”

Preexisting semantic representation improves working memory performance in the visuospatial domain

“…Further, by definition, signers are expert at processing signs and thus we expect them to have better WM performance than nonsigners with all three sign-related materials (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). On the basis of previous work showing better performance by deaf signers than hearing non-signers on a non-verbal visuospatial task (Corsi Block: Geraci, Gozzi, Papagno & Cecchetto, 2008;Orsini, Grossi, Capitani, Laiacona, Papagno & Vallar, 1987) we expected this effect, attributed to 8 experience of sign language, to generalize in the present study to non-linguistic manual actions.…”

Are Fibromyalgia Patients Cognitively Impaired? Objective and Subjective Neuropsychological Evidence

“…The DS assesses short-term verbal memory span and the ability to manipulate and update verbal information while in temporary storage (27,28). Subjects are required to repeat, immediately following presentation, increasingly longer strings of single digit numbers in either forward (DS-F) or reverse (DS-B) order.…”