title: The influence of strategies on relationships between working memory and cognitive skills.
abstract: The aim of this study was to test the effect of administration method on relationships between working memory span tasks and cognitive skills. Participants completed both participant-administered and experimenter-administered working memory measures in both verbal and visuospatial domains. Although the tasks were equally reliable, the additional time taken to implement strategies in the participant-administered tasks in the verbal domain reduced the correlations between working memory and reading comprehension and arithmetic. These findings did not extend to a visuospatial working memory measure, for which there was no significant difference between the participant-administered and experimenter-administered tasks in terms of their relationships with comprehension and arithmetic. However, performance on experimenter-administered working memory tasks in both verbal and visuospatial domains predicted unique variance in comprehension and arithmetic while controlling for scores on the participant-administered tasks. The results are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications for working memory research.
authors.affiliation: University of Hull, UK. H.St-Clair-Thompson@hull.ac.uk
authors.forename: Helen L St
authors.initials: HL
authors.lastname: Clair-Thompson
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D008433:Mathematics; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis