;
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Spring 2016
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remember the first addend "5" when solving "5 + 6 × 8," he/she will not be able to solve the
problem correctly. Indeed, the audio representation of mathematic operations is usually lengthy
and more cognitively demanding than visual representations. Consequently, individuals with VI
require strong auditory working memory skills as they need to temporarily hold the lengthy
audio information and process the information simultaneously.
Working memory is a memory system with limited capacity that temporarily maintains
and manipulates important information while simultaneously inhibiting irrelevant information
(Baddeley, 2003). Human's working memory system includes three components: visual working
memory, auditory working memory and the central execution system. Students with VI usually
have limited visual working memory because of the disability. Therefore, making the maximum
use of auditory working memory is of particular importance for students with VI.
An increasing number of studies have emerged during the last decade reporting that
visual working memory can be improved with training, yet limited research has examined the
auditory working memory training. Our goal is to examine the effects of an auditory working
memory training in students with VI. Specifically, we intend to examine the relative
effectiveness of the N-back working memory training program (Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides,
& Shah, 2011). In this program, participants are presented a random sequence of sound stimuli
of different letters (e.g., H-S-R-Q …), one at a time for 500 milliseconds and are asked to judge
by pressing keys in the following 2500ms whether the present stimulus was the same as the
previous stimulus. For example, if a participant started from 2-back, when presented with an
auditory stimuli string H-S-R-Q-F-A, the participant will be directed to determine if the third
sound was the same as the second sound, the fifth sound was the same as the third and so forth.
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