Have you ever tried to keep up with your day by switching between all the things you have to do? Of course you have. Multi-tasking and even just trying to focus our attention on one out of the million stimuli in the modern world are just part of everyone\u2019s lives. The system that makes this possible is called working memory. Working memory is what takes in all the stimuli of the environment, organizes it, attends to it, and decides whether to rehearse or try to remember the information or whether it simply should be thrown away and forgotten.<\/p>\n
Working memory is made up of 4 main parts. First off there are the two \u201cslave systems.\u201d These are the visuo-spatial sketchpad and the phonological loop. These are basic holding areas for incoming stimuli, the visuo-spatial sketchpad holds visual information such as maps, while the phonological loop deals with stimuli such as read words, numbers, or auditory stimuli. These segments simply take in the information, it is up to the other systems to choose what happens to that raw input. The central executive is the main decision hub of working memory, the place where a person decides what to attend to and rehearse into long term memory and what to forget. This balances the stimuli coming in to the slave systems and prioritizes everything into a sensible, useable form (Baddeley, 1974). The final part of the working memory model is the episodic buffer, the middleman between working memory and long term memory. It is what helps to make connections between the schemas we already have and what we are experiencing, allowing for pattern recognition and stronger encoding of information (Baddeley, 2000). In long term memory topics are connected together, either strongly or weakly, depending upon relatedness and number of connections. When a topic is brought up, say cows, all of the topics connected to cows get automatic activation, steak, spots, milk, grass, farm, and others. Then everything connected to those gets activated off of that, continuing and weakening in activation as they go out. When a stimuli comes in, like seeing a cow, those things will be activated, and it is the episodic buffers job to help build an even stronger connection between all that activated stuff and the cow you are seeing right now.<\/p>\n
People with better working memory show better general memory and reading comprehension when compared to others (Just, 1992). Those with higher working memory are also markedly better at multitasking. Finally, an interesting effect of difference in working memory is that those with better working memory learn much faster than those without. One 1992 Engle et al. experiment tested the effects of different learning environments on those with varying working memory. The participants had to learn words\/sentences at different rates of presentation. When the experimenter decided the rate of presentation of stimuli, higher working memory individuals performed much better at learning the stimuli. On the other hand, when the participant decided the rate of presentation, and thus could take all the time they needed to learn the stimuli, there was no significant difference in performance (Engle, 1992). This implies that those with higher working memory learn faster and easier, but it is not the only deciding factor of performance. When deciding for themselves how much time is needed to learn something the low working memory individuals were able to completely compensate for this immediate deficit and show the same results.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n References<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Engle, R. W. Individual differences in working memory and comprehension: A test of four <\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 hypotheses. <\/i>Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18(5) (1992).<\/p>\n Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in <\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 working memory<\/i>. Psychological Review, 99(1) (1992).<\/p>\n Baddeley, A.D. The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory?. <\/i>Department of<\/p>\n Experimental Psychology. 4(11) (2000).<\/p>\n Baddeley, A.D. and Hitch, G.J. (1974) Working memory<\/i>. In The Psychology of Learning and <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Motivation<\/em> (Bower, G.A., ed.), pp. 47\u201389, Academic Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you ever tried to keep up with your day by switching between all the things you have to do? Of course you have. Multi-tasking and even just trying to focus our attention on one out of the million stimuli in the modern world are just part of everyone\u2019s lives. The system that makes this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4680,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80216,80215],"tags":[80225],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4680"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":857,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions\/857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}