A Study Of The Effects Of Material Properties On Meta-Directed Forgetting In Children With Developmental Dyslexia

Children with developmental dyslexia are individuals who do not differ from other individuals in terms of general intelligence,motivation,life circumstances and educational conditions,and who do not have significant visual,hearing or neurological impairments,but whose reading performance is significantly below the appropriate level for their age and are in a state of reading difficulty.A large number of studies have explored the word memory and metamemory characteristics of children with developmental dyslexia,finding deficits in the children’s confidence in memory capacity assessment,memory monitoring accuracy,working memory capacity,inhibition of the central executive system,visuospatial working memory,and short-term memory encoding,but few have addressed the study of their intentional forgetting and forgetting monitoring abilities.Therefore,the present study sought to explore whether the main deficits in children with developmental dyslexia are in working memory and metacognition,and the processing mechanisms of learned judgments and directed forgetting under word and picture material,by examining the characteristics of metamemory,metadirected forgetting,memory and directed forgetting abilities in children with developmental dyslexia.In this study,Experiments 1 and 2 used a research paradigm that combined learned judgement and single-word methods to investigate the characteristics of metamemory,metadirected forgetting,memory,and directed forgetting and the differences between these four aspects and those of children in the reading level-matched and physiological age-matched groups when children with developmental dyslexia learned words and pictures,respectively,indicating the effects of cues on the processing mechanisms of learned judgement for words and pictures;Experiment 3 The characteristics of metamemory,meta-directed forgetting,memory,and directed forgetting and the differences in these four aspects with children in the reading level-matched group and children in the physiological age-matched group,and the differences in the processing mechanisms of learned judgments and directed forgetting under four experimental materials(word-word,picture-picture,word-picture,and picture-word)were investigated.The study produced the following findings and conclusions:(1)Compared to non-disabled children,children with developmental dyslexia assessed word metamemory and meta-directional forgetting at a lower level,had worse memory outcomes,and did not develop a word directed forgetting effect;(2)Compared to non-disabled children,children with developmental dyslexia assessed picture metamemory and meta-orientation forgetting at a lower level,remembered them less effectively,and did not develop a picture-orientation forgetting effect;(3)Children with developmental dyslexia were more confident in their ability to remember than to forget,both when learning words and pictures.(4)The nature of the material did not affect the metamemory and meta-orientation forgetting effects of children with developmental dyslexia when learning different materials,but children with developmental dyslexia did better at remembering pictures than words when reading pictures that required memorisation and forgetting;at the same time,the nature of the material affected the orientation forgetting effects of children in the reading level-matched group,demonstrating the domain generality of metacognition.This demonstrates that words and pictures have different mechanisms for orienting forgetting processing.