Understanding Working Memory
Working memory is an executive function that plays an important part in how we process, apply and recall information. It is the ability to keep information in mind in the face of distraction. If you’ve needed to remember a phone number, recollect how to get to a particular place or complete a history exam, you’ve used your working memory skills.
Working memory is used in mental tasks, such as language comprehension (for example, retaining ideas from early in a sentence to be combined with ideas later on), problem solving (in maths, carrying a digit from the ones to the tens column while remembering the numbers), and planning (working out the best order in which to visit the supermarket, post office and library). Many studies indicate that working memory capacity varies among people, predicts individual differences in intellectual ability, and changes across the life span (Cowan, 2005.)
Psychological research indicates that working memory plays a vital role in cognitive development as well as in the acquisition of skills. Working memory is like a ‘mental work space’ in which incoming information can be stored and manipulated. According to Baddeley’s (1986) model of working memory, illustrated below, there are separate storage systems for verbal working memory and visuo-spatial working memory, which are processed by a domain general central executive system (the ‘decision maker’). People who struggle with working memory usually have difficulties in either or both of these areas.
Verbal Working Memory
An individual uses their verbal working memory to process information given in verbal form, such as spoken instructions. Verbal working memory is key for learning language and completing comprehension tasks. The majority of information communicated to children in schools places demand on their verbal working memory and in the classroom, verbal working memory is essential for learning tasks such as:
remembering sequences of unrelated items,
following lengthy instructions,
problem-solving activities and games improving letter and number patterns.
Visuo-Spatial Working Memory
An individual uses their visuo-spatial working memory to process a different type of information, such as sequence of events, patterns, images, maths techniques and constructs. The following tasks are examples of skills which are reliant on the visuo-spatial component of working memory:
keeping track of where one is up to in a list of instructions,
remembering actions to a song or how to complete a task such as turning on a computer,
seeing a picture and understanding the image.
Children and young people with working memory difficulties in either the verbal or visuo-spatial domain often forget multi-part instructions or misunderstand instructions. They find it difficult to keep up with the pace and flow of discussion within lessons and at home, as a result of which they may begin to engage in low-level disruptive behaviour. Some might present with a short attention span and be prone to daydreaming, many will find it difficult to meet age related expectations in literacy and/or numeracy. It can be difficult for individuals with working memory difficulties to independently participate in learning, engage in discussions or to copy from the board.
Working Memory Capacity
Although working memory capacity is relatively fixed within an individual person, it varies between people. In terms of learning, those with greater working memory capacity are able to process more complicated ideas, while those with less capacity find this more difficult. A person’s capacity for working memory increases with age over the course of childhood, with an adult’s capacity being more than double the capacity of a 4 year old child. Research indicates that within an average Year 3 class (7-8 year olds) approximately 10% will have the same capacity as a 4 year old, while 10% will have the capacity of an average 11 year old.
In 1956, Miller suggested that the ‘normal’ working memory capacity for an adult was the “magic number seven”. He proposed that many of us can remember about 7 random numbers, letters or words 50% of the time. However, later research suggested that working memory capacity is more like 3 or 4 small pieces of information when the information is not familiar.
It is important at this point to acknowledge two important features of working memory, which are that it is content-limited (we can only process a small number of individual items or chunks of information at a time) and it is time-limited (we can only hold information in working memory for a short period of time before it decays).
How to improve memory
An adult’s working memory capacity is largely fixed and there is no way to increase one’s working memory capacity through training. That said, there are some things one can do to improve their brain’s natural ability to recall information by finding patterns and chunking information together. Here are five:
Chunking
One way to increase the amount of information we can recall is to chunk it together. This is when a number of small items of information can be combined so that the combined items behave as if they are a single item. We usually chunk based on meaning (for instance words associated with feelings, like ‘happy’, ‘sad’ and ‘frightened’) or frequent repetition of these things together, for example, the repetition of individual numbers in a telephone dialling code (like 0208 for Greater London, UK), a series of actions involved in making a sandwich (butter the bread, add filling, cut the sandwich, put it on a plate…) Chunking based on meaning happens when we use previously learned information to group new items together.
2. Practice makes perfect!
Challenge yourself to remember a series of items, whether it’s your grocery list, vocabulary words, or important dates. As you become better at remembering larger chunks of information, challenge yourself to remember even more. With children, memory games such as ‘I went to the shop and I bought…’ with increasing lists of items to remember can be helpful here.
3. Identify connections
If you are trying to remember a list of items, try to find ways to relate them to each other in meaningful ways. What do they have in common? You might group items together because they are each spelled with four letters, because they start with the same letter, because they have a similar meaning or because they share a similar purpose.
4. Make associations
Linking groups of items to things from your memory can also help make them more memorable. You might be more likely to remember that you need milk, bread and pepper if you imagine a piece of bread floating in peppery milk.
5. Incorporate other memory strategies
You might use mnemonics as a way to chunk different units of information. Some examples of this are using the phrase ‘Richard of York gave battle in vain’ to remember the colours of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, in case you were wondering!) If you are going to the supermarket and need bananas, eggs, sugar and tea, you might create a word out of the first letters of each item you need - BEST. Once you remember the keyword, you will then be better able to recall the items represented by each letter of the acronym.
Educational Psychologists can assess children and young people’s working memory skills, and suggest strategies for schools and parents to apply to maximise information.
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