Role of naming in delayed matching-to-sample

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Delayed matching-to-sample tasks assess memory and cognitive abilities.
• Severely intellectually disabled individuals often exhibit challenges in learning and memory tasks.
• The role of language in mediating visual memory is an area of ongoing research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the performance of severely intellectually disabled youths on a delayed matching-to-sample task using visual stimuli.
• To explore whether using auditory (dictated names) rather than visual samples could improve performance.
• To determine if explicit instructions to utilize language skills would enhance performance on visual delayed matching.

Main Methods:

• Four severely intellectually disabled youths participated in a delayed matching-to-sample task with picture stimuli.
• Experiment 1 involved visual-visual matching and auditory-visual matching under delayed conditions.
• Experiment 2 involved instructing participants to name pictures during the visual-visual matching task.

Main Results:

• Participants performed poorly on delayed picture-picture matching but accurately when matching pictures to dictated names.
• Three participants who could name the pictures did not spontaneously apply this skill to the visual matching task.
• Explicit instructions to name pictures during the task significantly improved delayed picture-picture matching performance.

Conclusions:

• Severely intellectually disabled individuals may not automatically apply existing language skills to new cognitive tasks.
• Language skills can be leveraged to improve performance on visual memory tasks in this population.
• Instructions can elicit the use of language skills, but this effect may be temporary.