(1999) and Passolunghi and Siegel (2004) did report both verbal WM differences and interference suppression difficulties in DD children. Both of these studies matched DD and control children in verbal IQ and Passolunghi and Siegel (2004) also matched reading performance, 5 FU and the studies used DD diagnosis cutoff scores at the 20th and 30th percentiles, respectively. Hence, diagnosis was more permissive than in our study and a further difference seems to be that diagnosis relied on a standardized test in which eight out of 12 problems were word problems (e.g., ‘On Pascoli Street there are 45

shops. 3/5 of them sell clothes. How many clothes shops are there in Pascoli Street?’; Pasolunghi et al., 1999; p. 781). In contrast, our study relied on two tests with overwhelmingly Arabic digit computational problems.

Hence, speculatively, perhaps the content of the tests used to identify the DD children affected results. In fact, Passolunghi and Siegel (2004) report a .38SD reading score difference between their DD and control populations. Assuming standard deviation (SD) = 15 this is equivalent to 5.7 score difference between groups. As shown in Fig. 1 in our sample differences in reading scores ranged between .2 and 2 scores, so DD and control populations were slightly better matched which may affect verbal WM results. Further, Pasolunghi et al. (1999) and Passolunghi and Siegel (2004) did not measure visual STM and WM function. Overall, this comparison points to the importance of find more GPX6 matching diagnostic instruments across studies and testing both verbal and visual WM. In addition, future studies should explore the exact nature of potential interference suppression deficits

in DD in visuo-spatial STM/WM tasks and investigate whether interference suppression deficits in different learning disabilities are the consequence of similar impaired mechanisms manifesting in different modalities. Accuracy equaled in DD and controls in the spatial symmetry task and in the mental rotation task. We detected slower solution times in DD than in controls on the trail-making A task, which confirms some previous findings (McLean and Hitch, 1999, Soltész et al., 2007 and Andersson, 2010), as well as on the mental rotation task. The accurate performance on the symmetry and rotation tasks suggests that spatial skills were available to DD albeit at a slower speed than to controls. Hence, we conclude that slower rotation speed and the slow trail-making performance (this task is usually thought to be very dependent on WM central executive function) relate to WM and inhibition function impairment in DD. The lack of positive findings with regard to the MR theory of DD is in sharp contrast with robust visuo-spatial STM/WM and inhibition-related findings. We have a number of reasons to assume that the lack of group × measure interactions in MR measures was not due to lack of power.