Visual and Visual-Spatial Memory Measures in Children

Abstract. Recent findings suggest that children developing spoken language while using a cochlear implant (CI) perform more poorly than normal-hearing (NH) children on short-term visual/visual-spatial sequence memory tasks, particularly when verbal recoding and verbal rehearsal strategies for the visual/visual-spatial information are possible. The present study examined the performance of children with CIs using two measures from the Children’s Memory Scale (CMS): memory for static patterns of dots and recognition memory for unfamiliar faces. The study included 31 eight- and nine-year old deaf children implanted before age five and 31 age- and gender-matched normal-hearing children. Published norms for normally-developing children were also available for comparison. On the dot locations task, the implanted children performed comparably to the published norms, but not as well as the normal-hearing comparison group. On the face recognition task, the CI group did more poorly than the published norms. Their scores were also lower than the normal-hearing comparison group. Although small, these differences reached statistical significance. Interestingly, face memory scores in the implant group showed a modest but significant positive correlation with short-ter