Working Memory

Cognitive load impacts the retention of new material. We saw in the last two posts that everyone has a load limit. In most people, it’s somewhere between 5 and 10 items in our working memory.

Oh geez, jargon! Working memory is where we balance new information. The information in there gets passed around, into and out of other memory types, i.e. short and long-term.

No new info gets in once we reach our cognitive load limit. Hence, the daydreamer who’s lost focus and is watching the janitor mow the grass outside.

There are lots of ways to manage the load on our memories.

Side note: none of us can multi-task.

My daughter completed her high school assignments on our home computer. She’d have several books open, internet sites running, music playing, TV remote nearby, phone hooked up to social media, and the assignment criteria pinned to the wall.

A check of a reference book and criteria resulted in a typed paragraph. In the middle of this, her phone would ping with a message. Before answering it, she’d change music tracks and flick TV channels. It looked like multi-tasking, but it wasn’t. Her frontal cortex (behind her forehead) was deftly flipping between tasks.

The downside was a millisecond delay in picking up the new task. The millisecond delay lengthened if the TV showed something interesting.