Short-Term Memory in Young Adults With Spastic Diplegic Cerebral Palsy

Abstract

We examined short-term memory activation processes and task-relevant, task-irrelevant, and dynamic inhibitory processes in a group of young adults with hypoxic-ischaemic prenatal spastic diplegic cerebral palsy (HI-CP, N = 27) with group-level and person-oriented methods of data analysis. Performance was compared with age, sex, and education of a matched control group (N = 135). We found that HI-CP is accompanied with low level of correct answers and high levels of task-relevant and task-irrelevant intrusions and repetitions on the Memory with Pause and Homogeneous Interference short-term memory tasks. Person-oriented analyses revealed several different configurations of dysfunction in the HI-CP group.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Airika Pening for the help with data collection. I am grateful to all participants in the study for their time and effort.

This work was supported by the Estonian Science Foundation, grant number ETF 7490.