Dissociation mémoire de travail-vitesse de traitement chez les enfants intellectuellement précoces au travers de deux études de cas

Abstract

Recently, it has been shown that developmental differences in working memory were largely due to an increase of the processing speed with age. The literature often reports that gifted children present a developmental advance compared to their peers of same age. This advance would be mainly located in the functions under the control of the prefrontal cortex. The aim of this research is to illustrate through a case study of two gifted children, the variety of profiles that can be observed in this population. In fact, despite a strong link between working memory and processing speed in the typical development, gifted children have developmental heterochrony with advances in a function without necessarily advances in the other. These results allowed to discuss the properties of the cognitive functioning of gifted children.