Young Children With Thinner Brain Regions Have Better Working Memory

Associations between the thickness of different cortical areas and children’s age and working memory (digit span); via Botdorf & Riggins, 2018 By Matthew Warren Anyone who has stood in the supermarket aisle trying to remember their shopping list might have wished for a larger brain. But when it comes to memory, bigger isn’t always better. A study published in Neuropsychologia has found that young children whose cerebral cortex is thinner in certain areas also tend to have better working memory. A number of previous brain imaging studies already found that working memory – which we use for remembering and manipulating pieces of information over short timescales – involves a network of brain areas in both the frontal and parietal cortices.  But most of these studies examined adults and older children, and few researchers have investigated younger children aged 4 to 6. At this age, children’s working memory usually improves drastically, so it’s important to understand what is going on in the brain, especially if this could help children with learning difficulties. In the new study, Morgan Botdorf and Tracy Riggins from the University of Maryland scanned the brains of 189 healthy children with no known learning difficulties aged between 4 and 8. An impressive 186 of the children remained still enough during the scan to provide usable data.  In a separate session outside of the MRI scanner, the researchers also assessed the kids’ working memory using the f...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Developmental Memory Source Type: blogs