Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual-task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuospatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy,…

Working memory performance in individuals with autism is a matter of debate in the literature. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of stimuli in the working memory of children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Sixteen children with ASD, clinically diagnosed as high functioning, were matched for gender and age and…

Children and adult learners benefit from viewing hand gestures at instruction across domains (Cook, Duffy, & Fenn, 2013; Huang, Kim, & Christianson, 2019; Ping & Goldin-Meadow, 2008). Within the domain of mathematical learning, gesture at instruction has been shown to benefit children and adults in laboratory and classroom settings…

It is well established that visual working memory (WM) for face identity is enhanced when faces display threatening versus nonthreatening expressions. During social interaction, it is also important to bind person identity with location information in WM to remember who was where, but we lack a clear understanding of how emotional expression…

Children with developmental language impairments (DLI) are often reported to show difficulties with working memory. This review describes the four components of the well-established working memory model, and considers whether there is convincing evidence for difficulties within each component in children with DLI. The emphasis is on the most…

In autism spectrum disorders, results of cognitive testing inform clinical care, theories of neurodevelopment, and research design. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and the Stanford-Binet are commonly used in autism spectrum disorder evaluations and scores from these tests have been shown to be highly correlated in typically developing…

This study, involving 20 normally developing 4-year olds, found no visual sequential recall differences between direct selection and scanning in task performance. However, subjects correctly recalled fewer sequential symbols represented by Blissymbols than by Picsyms, and recalled significantly fewer three-symbol sequences than two-symbol…