Development of cognitive control in children with pervasive developmental disorders.

Visual working memory (VWM) enables us to maintain visual information and simultaneously exclude distractors outside of VWM. The present study investigated how VWM storage would develop and become distractor-proof in children with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD). PDD children were instructed to remember the positions of 4 colored squares during a retention period filled with blank or visual distractors. Compared with typically developing children, the PDD children showed higher performance in the blank retention condition and lower performance in the visual distractor condition. These results suggest that the PDD children are vulnerable to distraction in spite of their large storage capacity.