How does the home environment shape working memory development? An exploration of home learning practices

• In Event: Exploring associations between parent and child executive function across childhood: Mechanisms, moderators, and main effects

Abstract

The home environment plays an important role in development, and has been frequently linked to developing executive functions (e.g., Andrews et al., 2021; Rosen et al., 2020; Stucke et al., 2021). Several studies indicate a specific role for cognitive enrichment in developing working memory (WM)—the ability to maintain and manipulate information in mind (e.g., Rosen et al., 2020; Sarsour et al., 2011). WM, in turn, predicts academic achievement (Speigel et al., 2021) and fostering WM skills may be one way that racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in achievement can be addressed. However, mechanisms through which cognitive enrichment at home may support WM skills remain to be fully explored. In the reported study, we tested the hypothesis that specific home learning practices may foster developing WM skills.

Participants were 57 Eastern-US children (M=5.83 years, range = 4.0-7.67 years; 30 females) and their caregivers. The sample was moderately diverse in terms of race and ethnicity: 74% identified as White, 5% as East or South Asian, 2% as Black, and 19% as Multiracial. Twelve percent identified as Latinx/Hispanic. Most caregivers had college degrees and more than half reported an annual family income of over $100k, reflecting the geographical region from which participants were recruited. Caregivers completed a survey in which they reported the frequency with which their child engaged in mathematical, literacy, spatial, and memory activities at home. Children completed 4 measures of WM: backward span tasks involving digits, blocks, letters and words.

With age, children engaged in more literacy practices at home, r=.5, p<.001. Similarly, older children engaged in more formal and informal home numeracy practices, r=.48, p<.001, and r=.33, p=.011, respectively. Frequency of home literacy practices was associated with WM as indexed by the backward digit span, over and above other home learning practices and age, t=2.96, p<.01. Frequency of literacy and spatial construction practices was associated with larger differences in performance on digit and literacy span tasks, favoring digit span, t=2.67, p<.01 and t=2.08, p<.05, respectively. Conversely, frequency of memory practices at home (e.g., memory matching games and puzzles) was associated with larger differences in performance on backward block and digit span tasks, favoring block span, t=3.37, p=.001. Spatial activities at home did not relate to backward block span, a measure of visuospatial WM. Item-level analyses revealed that writing sentences was related to backward digit span over and above age, r=.37, p<.01. Similarly, writing sentences, reading to oneself and reading words in the environment (e.g., on cereal boxes) were all significantly related to backward letter span performance, controlling for age, rs=.25-.31, ps<.05.

These findings suggest home learning practices, particularly related to literacy, may play a key role in emerging WM skills. Future research will test causal hypotheses that home literacy practices strengthen cognitive representations used in WM. Similarly, home memory practices may foster spatial representations that support visuospatial WM. Interventions to support literacy practices at home have the potential to foster WM skills and academic achievement, reducing achievement gaps and racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequity.

Authors

• Sabine Doebel, George Mason University
  Presenting Author

• Jordan Hassani, George Mason University