AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF WORKING MEMORY WITH GIFTED CHILDREN J-H Guignard, V.Camos, T.I. Lubart *

INTRODUCTION

•Renzulli (1986) opposes "schoolhouse giftedness" (gifted population identified with IQ tests) and "creative productive giftedness" (expressed through novel, original productions).

•Thus, classical assessments may be completed by other measures of individual characteristics to approach different forms of giftedness.

•Schoolhouse giftedness is linked to a high level of cognitive Schoolhouse giftedness is linked to a high level of cognitive resources, currently assessed with classical psychometric tests.resources, currently assessed with classical psychometric tests.

•According to Hambrick & Engle (2003), success in many tasks is predicted by the ability to maintain goals, action plans, and other task-relevant information in a highly activated and accessible state, and when necessary, to inhibit activation of irrelevant or distracting information. Indeed, working memory span tasks involving a complex activity performed concurrently with the retention of items have proven to be good predictors for high-level of cognitive performance.

• From this point of view, cognitive inhibition is important in executive functioning, as well as working memory capacity.

• In a previous study, we observed different patterns of development for gifted and non-gifted children on a divergent thinking task ; whereas the non-gifted sample showed increased performances between 5th and 7th grade, the gifted sample tended to stagnate.

•We hypothesized that this difference could be explained with regard to a creativity slump that occurs during development. The emergence of new inhibition capacities temporally reduce creative performances.

• Following the multivariate conception of giftedness, we suggest that the intellectually gifted are distinguished by high performance on working memory and cognitive inhibition tasks. But such cognitive ressources are not sufficient for high level of performances in creative thinking .

*Laboratoire Cognition et Développement, Université Paris 5 (CNRS-UMR 8605), 71 avenue Edouard Vaillant, 92774, Boulogne-Billancourt Cedex FRANCE. Contact : guignard@psycho.univ-paris5.fr

PARTICIPANTS76 French children in 6th grade (Institution Ste Jeanne d’Arc, Melun and Cours Hattemer, Paris) : 28 children (m=11,22 years old

SD=0,84) identified as gifted (based on WISC III-R IQ ≥130) and 38 children not identified as gifted (m=11,92 years old, SD=0,44).

RESULTS

MATERIALS• Reasoning and Verbal Fluidity tasks (PMA).

• New working memory task (Reading Letters Span task): Children were asked to retain numbers as they read loudly a list of letters appearing successively on a computer screen (see Barrouillet, Lépine & Camos, 2004).

• Cognitive inhibition is tested on a directed forgetting task inspired by Kipp (2 half lists of 10 words in 3 conditions: Forget all, Remember all, and Forget only). • Divergent thinking task: Unusual Uses for a Cardboard Box.

DISCUSSION

This poster presents the results of a larger study on giftedness. In this report, we examine cognitive aspects of intellectual giftedness.

First, children with high IQ obtain higher scores on the classical intelligence tests we used, which confirms their status of « gifted ». Moreover, we found that other measurements of cognitive activity may be useful to assess giftedness. Indeed, Table 1 shows a significant difference on RLS scores, in favor of the gifted sample. This supports our hypothese on the role played by working memory in giftedness, which seems to constitute a relevant indice of intellectual giftedness.

Secondly, as expected, the divergent thinking activity failed to discriminate intellectually gifted and non-gifted children. This result is consistent with a previous study involving 5th and 7th graders (gifted performed best in 7th, but were weaker in 5th, showing a stagnation of creative thinking for gifted group). We suggest that enhanced cognitive inhibition capacities play a role in the development of gifted children’s creative thinking. This hypothesis is partly confirmed in this study. Indeed, the inhibition task does not show higher scores for the gifted, but we observed strong negative correlations between divergent thinking and inhibition scores. The next step of this research will be to compare our gifted sample with non-gifted children of the same age, through different school grades.

Table 1 : Analyse of Variance in 6th grade, comparing gifted (hp) vs. non-gifted (nhp)

Table 2 : Correlations between inhibition score and divergent thinking indices for gifted and non-gifted children (in red, p<.05)

0,370,000,29Inhibition (nhp, n=45)

-0,39-0,48-0,43Inhibition (hp, n=26)

OriginalityFlexibilityFluidity

Means SD F nhp=18,18 4,95 F(1,74)=11,06; p<,001 28nhp=14,31 4,85 48hp=23,18 8,35 F(1,74)=8,14; p<,001 28nhp=18,73 5,26 48hp=9,22 2,53 27nhp=7,46 2,64 45hp=2,78 0,83 28nhp=2,75 0,96 48hp=14,62 7,11nhp= 13,47 6,31hp=8,61 3,44nhp=7,87 2,97hp=15,69 10,38nhp=13,07 7,66

F(1,70)=7,68; p<,001

hp=26

nhp=45

NS

NS

Fluidity

Flexibility

Originality

Reasoning

Verbal Fluidity

Working memory

Inhibition