Effect of mental abacus training on working memory for children

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of mental abacus training for children on their working memory. Suppression tasks were manipulated to investigate the roles played by visuo-spatial sketchpad and phonological loop for working memory of the primary task in tree experiments. The results showed that children who had received mental abacus training exhibited better performance on digit span but not Chinese word span than the ones without mental abacus training. The results also indicated that the mental arithmetic should depend on phonological loop to maintain and store numerical information for the children who had not received mental abacus training. Based on the results, children who had received mental abacus training have better performance in mental calculation than the ones without training. The author speculated that these children may execute mental calculation with their visuo-spatial sketchpad to form mental imagery. Keywords︰mental abacus training; working memory; visuo-spatial sketchpad; phonological loop