and that the effect gradually transferred to other areas, with significant and meaningful increases in reading comprehension, mathematics (geometry), and iq (measured by raven matrices). additionally, a marked increase in ability to inhibit impulses was detected in the follow up after one year, measured as a higher score in the go-no go task. four years after the treatment, the effects persisted and was captured as a 16 percentage point higher acceptance rate to the academic track (german gymnasium), as compared to the control group. in a large-scale screening study, one in ten children in mainstream classrooms were identified with working memory deficits. the majority of them performed very poorly in academic achievements, independent of their iq. similarly, working memory deficits have been identified in national curriculum low-achievers as young as seven years of age. without appropriate intervention, these children lag behind their peers. a recent study of 37 school-age children with significant learning disabilities has shown that working memory capacity at baseline measurement, but not iq, predicts learning outcomes two years later. this suggests that working memory impairments are associated with low learning outcomes and constitute a high risk factor for educational underachievement for children. in children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, adhd, and developmental coordination disorder, a similar pattern is evident. relation to attention there is some evidence that optimal working memory performance links to the neural ability to focus attention on task-relevant information and to ignore distractions, and that practice-related improvement in working memory is due to increasing these abilities. one line of research suggests a link between the working memory capacities of a person and their ability to control the orientation of attention to stimuli in the environment. such control enables people to attend to information important for their current goals, and to ignore goal-irrelevant stimuli that tend to capture their attention due to their sensory saliency (such as an ambulance siren). the direction of attention according to one's goals is assumed to rely on "top-down" signals from the pre-frontal cortex (pfc) that biases processing in posterior cortical areas. capture of attention by salient stimuli is assumed to be driven by "bottom-up" signals from subcortical structures and the primary sensory cortices. the ability to override "bottom-up" capture of attention differs between individuals, and this difference has been found to correlate with their performance in a working-memory test for visual information. another study, however, found no correlation between the ability to override attentional capture and measures of more general working-memory capacity. relationship with neural disorders an impairment of working memory functioning is normally seen in several neural disorders: adhd: several authors have proposed that symptoms of adhd arise from a primary deficit in a specific executive function (ef) domain such as working memory, response inhibition or a more general weakness in executive control. a meta-analytical review cites several studies that found significant lower group results for adhd in spatial and verbal working memory tasks, and in several other ef tasks. however, the authors concluded that ef weaknesses neither are necessary nor sufficient to cause all cases of adhd. several neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and glutamate may be involved in both adhd and working memory. both are associated with the frontal brain, self-direction and self-regulation, but cause–effect have not been confirmed, so it is unclear whether working memory dysfunction leads to adhd, or adhd distractibility leads to poor functionality of working memory, or if there is some other connection. parkinson's disease: patients with parkinson's show signs of a reduced verbal function of working memory. they wanted to find if the reduction is due to a lack of ability to focus on relevant tasks, or a low amount of memory capacity. twenty-one patients with parkinson's were tested in comparison to the control group of 28 participants of the same age. the researchers found that both hypotheses were the reason working memory function is reduced which did not fully agree with their hypothesis that it is either one or the other. alzheimer's disease: as alzheimer's disease becomes more serious, less working memory functions. in addition to deficits in episodic memory, alzheimer's disease is associated with impairments in visual short-term memory, assessed using delayed reproduction tasks. these investigations point to a deficit in visual feature binding as an important component of the deficit in alzheimer's disease. there is one study that focuses on the neural connections and fluidity of working memory in mice brains. half of the mice were given an injection that mimicked the effects of alzheimer's, and the other half were not. then the mice were expected to go through a maze that is a task to test working memory. the study helps answer questions about how alzheimer's can deteriorate the working memory and ultimately obliterate memory functions. huntington's disease: a group of researchers hosted a study that researched the function and connectivity of working memory over a 30-month longitudinal experiment. it found that there were certain places in the brain where most connectivity was decreased in pre-huntington diseased patients, in comparison to the control group that remained consistently functional. relationship with uncertainty a recent study by li and colleagues showed evidence that the same brain regions responsible for working memory are also responsible for how much humans trust those memories. in the past, studies have shown that individuals can evaluate how much they trust their own memories, but how humans can do this was largely unknown. using spatial memory tests and fmri scans, they processed where and when the information was being stored and used this data to determine memory errors. they also asked the participants to express how uncertain they were about their memories. with both sets of information, the researchers could conclude that memory and the trust in that memory are stored within the same brain region.