The block design task (BDT) is a visuospatial measure that individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) perform poorly on. However, it is unclear what underlies their impaired performance. This study investigated whether poorer performance is a result of visuospatial difficulties, executive function (EF) difficulties, atypical looking strategies, or a…

This secondary analysis of data from a randomized control trial of an early mathematics intervention, ROOTS, explored whether patterns of intervention response were best categorized by the typical response/non-response binary or a more complex framework with additional response profiles. Participants included kindergarten students at risk for…

Based on the finding that children with mathematical learning difficulties (MLD) have deficits in working memory (WM), the question arises as to whether these children differ from typical learners only in the level or also in the developmental trajectories of WM functioning. To this end, the WM of 80 children with MLD and 71 typical learners was…

The current study investigated the cognitive deficit profiles among individuals with mathematics difficulties (MD) and potential moderators and mechanism for these profiles. Seventy-five cognitive profiling studies on MD were included, representing a total of 13,001 individuals and 126 independent samples. Results showed that compared with…

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine the relation between mathematics and working memory (WM) and to identify possible moderators of this relation including domains of WM, types of mathematics skills, and sample type. A meta-analysis of 110 studies with 829 effect sizes found a significant medium correlation of mathematics and WM, r…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the associations between elementary school children's mathematical achievement and their conservation abilities, visuospatial skills, and numerosity processing speed. We also assessed differences in these abilities between children with different types of learning problems. In Study 1 (N = 229), we…

Weaknesses in early number skills have been found to be a risk factor for later difficulties in mathematical performance. Nevertheless, only a few intervention studies with young children have been published. In this study, the responsiveness to early support in kindergarteners with most severe difficulties was examined with two different computer…

Congenital amusia manifests as a lifelong difficulty in making sense of musical sound. The extent to which this disorder is accompanied by deficits in visuo-spatial processing is an important question, bearing on the issue of whether pitch processing draws on supramodal spatial representations. The present study assessed different aspects of…

Arithmetic and cognitive skills of children with mathematical difficulties (MD-only), with comorbid reading difficulties (MD-RD), with reading difficulties (RD-only), and normally achieving children were examined at 3 points from Grades 3-4 to Grades 5-6 (age range, 9-13 years). Both MD groups displayed severe weaknesses in 4 domain-specific…

A main aim of this study was to test the claim that individuals with Williams syndrome have selectively impaired memory for spatial as opposed to visual information. The performance of 16 individuals with Williams syndrome (six males, 10 females; mean age 18y 7mo [SD 7y 6mo], range 9y 1mo-30y 7mo) on tests of short-term memory for item and…

Background: Although it is believed that children with cerebral palsy are at high risk for learning difficulties and arithmetic difficulties in particular, few studies have investigated this issue. Methods: Arithmetic ability was longitudinally assessed in children with cerebral palsy in special (n = 41) and mainstream education (n = 16) and…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the performance of freshmen chemistry students with poor spatial visualization skills. In the first experiment, 31 chemistry students with academically deficient backgrounds completed a diagnostic test of their ability to visualize and interpret pictorial representations of simple molecular structures. At…