Bloomer's Developmental Neuropsychological Assessments Volume II

Short Term Memory Capacity is one of the most important measures of a child s potential. It dictates how much information a learner can handle at one time and thus his or her rate of progress in school.. Short Term Memory (STM) is a protective device to prevent stimulus overload to the brain. Seen in an alternative light, STM can be seen as a gateway for stimulation into the learning process. Each individual learners Short Term Memory may vary within limits. It is because of this gateway function that persons focused on teaching or rehabilitation are interested in short term memory. Limitation of stimulation by the short term memory process controls the flow of information to the brain. While the Short Term Memory represents an upper limit for information received by the brain it is subject to some improvement through training. We present five measures if Short Term Memory in visual and auditory presentation and verbal and written response mode for comparison of stimulus and response efficiency. We are habituated from the past to think of Short Term Memory as a unitary concept and thus a measure like digit span is often seen as an adequate measure of memory, but this is not so. We now know that different types of information travel different routes in the brain and differing response modes activate differing potions of the motor nerves. Auditory verbal tasks have been found to be relatively unrelated to reading, but visual simultaneous STM tasks are highly related. Therefore, we ask children to respond to in both auditory and visual modes and to provide verbal and written responses for both letters and words to answer questions concerning specific memory capacities. Volume II measures visual and auditory sequential, and visual simultaneous Short Term Memory with written responses; and probes auditory and visual simultaneous short term memory with verbal response thus allowing separate indices for inferior and superior temporal lobe functioning the most useful STM measures when assessing learners for language processing difficulties.