Wu Nan, Chen Yulu, Yang Jinhua, Li Fei
Department of Psychology, Teachers' College of Beijing Union UniversityBeijing, China.
Department of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Shanghai Children's Medical Center, Ministry of Education-Shanghai Key Laboratory of Children's Environmental Health, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong UniversityShanghai, China.
Front Psychol. 2017 Apr 19;8:611. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00611. eCollection 2017.
The present study examined the role of working memory in the association between childhood obesity and academic performance, and further determined whether memory deficits in obese children are domain-specific to certain tasks or domain-general. A total of 227 primary school students aged 10-13 years were analyzed for weight and height, of which 159 children (44 "obese," 23 "overweight," and 92 "normal weight") filled out questionnaires on school performance and socioeconomic status. And then, all subjects finished three kinds of working memory tasks based on the digit memory task in 30 trials, which were image-generated with a series of numbers recall trial sets. After each trial set, subjects were given 5 s to recall and write down the numbers which hand appeared in the trial, in the inverse order in which they had appeared. The results showed there were significant academic performance differences among the three groups, with normal-weight children scoring higher than overweight and obese children after Bonferroni correction. A mediation model revealed a partial indirect effect of working memory in the relationship between obesity and academic performance. Although the performance of obese children in basic working memory tests was poorer than that of normal-weight children, they recalled more items than normal-weight children in working memory tasks involving with food/drink. Working memory deficits partially explain the poor academic performance of obese children. Those results indicated the obese children show domain-specific working memory deficits, whereas they recall more items than normal-weight children in working memory tasks associated with food/drink.
本研究考察了工作记忆在儿童肥胖与学业成绩之间关联中的作用，并进一步确定肥胖儿童的记忆缺陷是特定于某些任务领域还是一般性领域。对总共227名年龄在10至13岁的小学生进行了体重和身高分析，其中159名儿童（44名“肥胖”、23名“超重”和92名“正常体重”）填写了关于学业成绩和社会经济地位的问卷。然后，所有受试者基于数字记忆任务完成了30次试验中的三种工作记忆任务，这些任务是通过一系列数字回忆试验集进行图像生成的。在每个试验集之后，给予受试者5秒钟来回忆并写下试验中出现的数字，按照它们出现的相反顺序。结果显示，三组之间存在显著的学业成绩差异，经邦费罗尼校正后，正常体重儿童的得分高于超重和肥胖儿童。一个中介模型揭示了工作记忆在肥胖与学业成绩关系中的部分间接效应。虽然肥胖儿童在基本工作记忆测试中的表现比正常体重儿童差，但在涉及食物/饮料的工作记忆任务中，他们回忆的项目比正常体重儿童更多。工作记忆缺陷部分解释了肥胖儿童学业成绩不佳的原因。这些结果表明，肥胖儿童表现出特定领域的工作记忆缺陷，而在与食物/饮料相关的工作记忆任务中，他们回忆的项目比正常体重儿童更多。
