![]() (Words she already knows have been deeply embedded in her brain, so it takes less working memory to make sense of them.) New words, in particular, become a nightmare for your child because she’ll have to process unfamiliar syllable combinations. But since children with poor auditory working memory find it hard to keep these steps in mind, they might find this frustrating. We usually need to go through a few mental steps when we’re trying to solve any problem. She’ll have to both make sense of what the teacher is saying and write it down as she listens. Your child might struggle to take notes because she’ll have to multitask. This is because they’ll have trouble linking letters with sounds - an issue that’s also seen with learning differences. Poor auditory working memory will make it harder for young children to learn how to read and write. But if there are issues along the way, here’s how they’ll often show up: From age 4 to adulthood, she’ll likely double her working memory capacity - both how much information she can hold at a time, and how long she can hold that information for. Your child’s working memory will gradually increase as she grows older. More of their mental capacity is used up to separate speech from the surrounding noise, which means there’s less of it available for working memory.) If your child has issues with her auditory working memory, it’ll usually show up in one of the following ways. (This is why even children without working memory issues can struggle to focus in noisy environments. It’s not that she doesn’t want to learn - her working memory is just letting her down. If any part of that chain is broken, she won’t understand what’s going on and will pretty soon lose interest. Your child needs to hear the words, hold them in her mind, and then put them together to form sentences using her working memory. For example, imagine a teacher talking about an assignment due the next day. She’ll need a lot of it just to pay attention in class. ![]() But working memory affects your child at a much more basic level. After all, you’ll need a lot of mental workspace to solve a multistep maths or science problem. It’s obviously going to be hard to do well in school if your working memory hasn’t developed enough. Auditory working memory plays an essential role in your child’s life but at a much more basic level than you’d think. Auditory working memory solves this problem by keeping those sounds in our minds for a bit while helping us make sense of them. This processing takes time, though, and the sounds would have disappeared by then. We might ‘hear’ someone speaking to us, but it’s only by ‘listening’ that we figure out what they’re saying. It’s something we do consciously to process what we’ve heard. This happens automatically without us realising it. When we ‘hear’ someone talking, our ears take in the sounds they make and send them to our brains. There’s a difference between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’. And it’s how we make sounds stay in our minds long after they’ve disappeared from the outside world. In contrast, working memory lets you interact and play around with that information.) Auditory working memory is working memory for sound. With short-term memory, you’re just holding information in your mind. ( Note: working memory is different from short-term memory. Working memory is a core ability we need for things like planning, reasoning, and problem-solving, and it’s part of our critical executive functions. So, if you’re reading a list of numbers about mortality rates in different countries, your brain plays around with those statistics in your working memory - looking for patterns and meaning. It holds the things we’ve just learned in storage for short periods of time so that we can fit them together like a puzzle and get some meaning from them. And working memory is a brain system that helps you do this. It needs to lay out all that article’s information somewhere, before you can start to make sense of it. ![]() But how do you make sense of it all? Think of a tinkerer putting out the parts of a broken toaster on a table, first, before deciding how to fix it. You’re taking in statistics, stories from survivors, reports from doctors, and so on. Imagine you’re reading an article about the pandemic. Think of it as a temporary ‘workspace’ in your mind. Our brains have an impressive ability to absorb and make sense of input from a vastly complex world. But if they can learn to work with their strengths, instead, they’ll be able to overcome most difficulties. And because of this, children with poor auditory working memory often struggle in school. This working memory is crucial in so many daily tasks like solving problems, learning, following instructions, and more. It’s where we temporarily store sounds we hear as we try to make sense of them. Takeaway: Auditory working memory is a virtual ‘workspace’ in our mind.
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