WORKING MEMORY

A component of memory which holds short-term information for the purposes of performing a current process. It is distinguished from long-term memory (LTM), which stores information permanently or for long periods. The information in working memory may come from external sources (as with linguistic input that is being processed) or it may be retrieved from LTM and held temporarily for present use. The term ‘working memory’ is often preferred to short-term memory on the grounds that this component does not simply store information but also processes the information it holds.

Working memory (WM) is said to have limited capacity. It is limited (a) in terms of what it can store; and (b) in terms of the amount of processing it can undertake.

Limitations on storage capacity mean that it is under pressure:

to chunk information (combining smaller units into larger ones). An eight-digit phone number is better remembered as 83-42-76-18 instead of 83427618;

to shed verbatim information and replace it with abstract propositions (one complete idea instead of a number of words);

to transfer important information to LTM before it decays.

Limitations on processing mean that complex tasks make heavy demands upon WM resources because they require high levels of attention. Syntactically complex sentences may even exceed our attentional capacity: hence the difficulty of processing a multiply embedded sentence like The man the cat the dog chased bit died.

The limited capacity of WM explains the relevance of developing processes which are automatic. They make fewer demands upon WM than controlled processes, leaving capacity spare for other operations. A reader who is able to decode words automatically instead of painfully deciphering them has spare resources of attention to allocate to achieving a richer understanding of what is being read.

WM capacity varies between individuals. This may reflect

how much information an individual is able to store;

how rapidly information decays when held in an individual’s store;

how much information an individual is able to rehearse (repeat in the mind as a way of retaining it in memory).

The most detailed model of WM (Gathercole and Baddeley, 1993) consists of a central executive which determines how much attention to allocate to a particular processing task. It also co-ordinates activity within WM and controls the transfer of information from other parts of the cognitive system (including from LTM). The executive regulates two dependent components or slave systems, which are responsible for short-term processing and for maintaining material in memory. One, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, deals with non-verbal material which is visual or spatial in form. The other, the phonological loop, handles verbal information.

The phonological loop is able to briefly store a phonologically encoded record of spoken language. However, the store has a very limited capacity, and the traces decay quickly (in 1–2 seconds). If we wish to retain what we have heard, we have to make use of a rehearsal mechanism which enables us to review it in our minds, thus preventing the verbatim form of words from fading. Rehearsal involves subvocal repetition of the material; hence the ‘voice in the head’ that subjects sometimes report when doing a memorisation task. Its main role in speech processing appears to be to ensure that a listener retains the surface form of an utterance for long enough to parse it syntactically.

The second function of the rehearsal mechanism is to convert written words into phonological code. This enables them to be rehearsed and fed into the phonological store in the same way as spoken words. It may seem curious that visual words are not stored in the visuo-spatial sketchpad. However, there is considerable evidence of a phonological basis to the way written language is processed and committed to memory.

See also: Attention, Automaticity, Embedded processes model, Long term memory, Phonological working memory, Rehearsal

Further reading: Gathercole and Baddeley (1993)

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