27 Facts About Working memory

Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily.

Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information.

Working memory is a theoretical concept central to cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.

Short-term memory is the ability to remember information over a brief period.

The episodic buffer resembles Tulving's concept of episodic Working memory, but it differs in that the episodic buffer is a temporary store.

Representations in working memory are a subset of representations in long-term memory.

An early quantification of the capacity limit associated with short-term Working memory was the "magical number seven" suggested by Miller in 1956.

Working memory claimed that the information-processing capacity of young adults is around seven elements, which he called "chunks", regardless of whether the elements are digits, letters, words, or other units.

Nonetheless, Cowan proposed that working memory has a capacity of about four chunks in young adults.

That is, the chunks in working memory act as retrieval cues that point to the digits they contain.

The question of what features a task must have to qualify as a good measure of working memory capacity is a topic of ongoing research.

Resource theories assume that the capacity of working memory is a limited resource that must be shared between all representations that need to be maintained in working memory simultaneously.

Errors in serial recall tasks are often confusions of neighboring items on a memory list, showing that retrieval competition plays a role in limiting our ability to recall lists in order, and probably in other working memory tasks.

The idea is that each word, digit, or other item in working memory is represented as a bundle of features, and when two items share some features, one of them steals the features from the other.

Working memory is among the cognitive functions most sensitive to decline in old age.

Working memory argues that working memory depends to a large degree on the prefrontal cortex, which deteriorates more than other brain regions as we grow old.

Age-related decline in working memory can be briefly reversed using low intensity transcranial stimulation to synchronize rhythms in prefrontal and temporal areas.

Brodmann's areas 6,8, and 9, in the superior frontal cortex was involved when working memory must be continuously updated and when memory for temporal order had to be maintained.

Working memory has been suggested to involve two processes with different neuroanatomical locations in the frontal and parietal lobes.

Articulating the differential function of brain regions involved in working memory is dependent on tasks able to distinguish these functions.

Working memory is impaired by acute and chronic psychological stress.

Working memory capacity is correlated with learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy.

One longitudinal study showed that a child's working memory at 5 years old is a better predictor of academic success than IQ.

Similarly, working memory deficits have been identified in national curriculum low-achievers as young as seven years of age.

An impairment of working memory functioning is normally seen in several neural disorders:.

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.

Recent study by Li and colleagues showed evidence that the same brain regions responsible for working memory are responsible for how much humans trust those memories.