Visuospatial Working Memory Capacity in Parents of Children with Neurodevelop mental Disorders

Working Memory Capacity (WMC) is the ability to actively maintain a goal in the presence of interference due to habit or secondary task processing. WMC is often reported in individual differences of typical participants when delineating the working memory (WM) system as a whole. But few have studied WMC in healthy irst-degree relatives of a clinical sample. This study attempts to examine visuospatial WMC in healthy parents of children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD). NDD is deined in a unitary conceptual manner. A one-group design for a purposive sample of 54 parents (42 mothers and 12 fathers) were screened for psychiatric morbidity and cognitive impairments in this study. Visuospatial N-back and Spatial span tasks were used for our assessment of WMC. Results suggested a signiicant difference between the two task performances. The nature of the tasks and the sample characteristics, along with its implications on parenting, were discussed in brief.