TY  - JOUR
A1  - McKay, Courtney A.
A1  - Shing, Yee Lee
A1  - Rafetseder, Eva
A1  - Wijeakumar, Sobanawartiny
T1  - Home assessment of visual working memory in pre-schoolers reveals associations between behaviour, brain activation and parent reports of life stress
T2  - Developmental science
N2  - Visual working memory (VWM) is reliably predictive of fluid intelligence and academic achievements. The objective of the current study was to investigate individual differences in pre-schoolers’ VWM processing by examining the association between behaviour, brain function and parent-reported measures related to the child's environment. We used a portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy system to record from the frontal and parietal cortices of 4.5-year-old children (N = 74) as they completed a colour change-detection VWM task in their homes. Parents were asked to fill in questionnaires on temperament, academic aspirations, home environment and life stress. Children were median-split into a low-performing (LP) and a high-performing (HP) group based on the number of items they could successfully remember during the task. LPs increasingly activated channels in the left frontal and bilateral parietal cortices with increasing load, whereas HPs showed no difference in activation. Our findings suggest that LPs recruited more neural resources than HPs when their VWM capacity was challenged. We employed mediation analyses to examine the association between the difference in activation between the highest and lowest loads and variables from the questionnaires. The difference in activation between loads in the left parietal cortex partially mediated the association between parent-reported stressful life events and VWM performance. Critically, our findings show that the association between VWM capacity, left parietal activation and indicators of life stress is important to understand the nature of individual differences in VWM in pre-school children.
KW  - fNIRS
KW  - home testing
KW  - individual differences
KW  - life stress
KW  - pre-school children
KW  - visual working memory
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/63965
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-639650
SN  - 1467-7687
N1  - European Commission, Grant/Award Number: ERC-2018-StG-
PIVOTAL-758898; Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grant/Award Number: OPP1119415; Jacobs Foundation, Grant/Award Number: JRF 2018–2020
VL  - 24
IS  - 4, e13094
SP  - 1
EP  - 14
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Oxford [u.a.]
ER  -