0000000000240031
AUTHOR
Juhani Lehto
Dimensions of executive functioning: Evidence from children
This study investigated dimensions of executive functioning in 8- to 13-year-old children. Three tasks from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB), two tasks from the NEPSY battery and some additional executive function (EF) tests were administered to 108 children. In line with earlier work, modest correlations among EF measures were obtained (r < .4). Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses yielded three interrelated factors, which resembled those obtained by Miyake et al. (2000) and which were—with some reservations—labelled Working Memory (WM), Inhibition and Shifting. Age correlated with performance on most individual EF measures as well as Shifting a…
Tower of Hanoi and working memory in adult persons with intellectual disability
Persons with intellectual disability (ID) have been found to perform more poorly than their mental age would suggest in the visuo-spatial problem solving task Tower of Hanoi (TOH). Inefficient performance has been assumed to be related to inability to use sophisticated problem solving strategies because of restricted working memory capacity. In the present study, the TOH performance of adult persons with ID was found to be equal to that of fluid-intelligence-matched general children. However, persons with ID violated the rules of the TOH more often, and needed more trials to solve the TOH problems than the children did. Visuo-spatial and executive working memory tasks were significantly con…
Assessing dyslexia in Finnish high-school students: a pilot study
A pilot study concerning Finnish dyslexics at senior high school (lukio), for 16–19-year-olds, is reported. The phonological processing deficit was assumed to underlie dyslexia in these late teenage subjects. The regular nature of Finnish orthography was taken into consideration. Four tasks were introduced to a total of 32 students, of whom 15 were dyslexics and 17 were controls. The controls outperformed the dyslexics on three tasks: text recoding, pseudoword recoding and pseudoword spelling. On the text spelling task, both groups performed equally well. In the correlational analysis of all subjects, both recoding tasks showed high correlations with selfestimated school achievement in lang…
National survey of reading comprehension in Finland
As a part of an extensive project for the evaluation of the Finnish comprehensive school, a recently developed reading comprehension measure; a hierarchy-rating test, and a more conventional multiple-choice task were used to assess reading comprehension skills in population-based samples of 2,891 sixth-graders (12‐13 years old) and 1,953 (15‐16 years old) ninth-graders. The hierarchy-rating task was constructed within the theoretical framework proposed by W. Kintsch and van Dijk (1978). It was designed to examine the cognitively high-level text processing, or macroprocessing, of expository passages. The multiple-choice task and the hierarchy-rating task showed only a moderate intercorrelati…