Division on Visual Impairments

DVI Quarterly Volume 59(3)

A quarterly newsletter from the Council for Exceptional Children's Division on Visual Impairments containing practitioner tips for Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments, Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialists, and other professionals.

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; Lorem Ipsum Dolor Spring 2016 14 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. 41

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