Working memory and intrusions of irrelevant information in a group of specific poor problem solvers

An important body of evidence has shown that reading comprehension ability is related to working memory and, in particular, to the success in Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) reading and listening span test. This research tested a similar hypothesis for arithmetic word problems, since, in order to maintain and process the information, they require working memory processes. A group of children possessing average vocabulary but poor arithmetic problem-solving skills was compared with a group of good problem solvers, matched for vocabulary, age, and socioeconomic status. Poor problem solvers presented lower recall and a greater number of intrusion errors in a series of tasks testing working memory and memory for problems. The results obtained over a series of six experimental phases, conducted during a 2-school-year period, offer evidence in favor of the hypotheses that groups of poor problem solvers may have poor performance in a working memory test requiring inhibition of irrelevant information (Hypothesis 1), but not in other short-term memory tests (Hypothesis 2), that this difficulty is related to poor recall of critical information and greater recall of to-be-inhibited information (Hypothesis 3), that poor problem solvers also have difficulty in remembering only relevant information included in arithmetic word problems (Hypothesis 4) despite the fact that they are able to identify relevant information (Hypothesis 5). The results show that problem-solving ability is related to the ability of reducing the memory accessibility of nontarget and irrelevant information.