Hi I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. This video is part of a series looking at
how you can learn and study more effectively. In this video we're going to be focusing on working
memory. So the first question you might have is what is working memory? What does this refer to?
Your working memory is your ability to hold information
in mind and then manipulate or work with it. So if you're recalling a URL for a website long enough
to type it or maybe you're adding up some numbers or you're calculating change in a transaction
or maybe you're remembering a phrase just long enough to google it
in these cases you're holding that information in your working memory.
You can think of it as a sort of like a mental workspace that you have and you can
pull information into that workspace you can hold it there and then you can also work with it. So
if I ask you to add 27 plus 35 you take each of those numbers you're able to hold them in mind
in this workspace you have 27 and 35 and hopefully you have enough space or enough capacity here that
you can also work with these numbers and you can start to add them together. You might say okay
20 and 30 would be 50 and 7 and 5 would be 12 so it'll be 62. In that case you're using your
working memory capacity to solve the problem. All right so how does this relate to learning
and studying? Well the important thing to know about working memory is that it has a very limited
capacity. You might have been able to handle 27 plus 35 but if I gave you a lot of numbers you
suddenly wouldn't be able to do this anymore. If i said 27 plus 35 plus 42 plus 17 plus 91 plus 57
plus 33 plus 14 you'd find this problem is much more difficult if not impossible for you to do
and the reason is you just can't hold all that information in mind at once. So even
though you could do two-digit addition in your head in the first case with 27 and 35
once I added many more numbers you just didn't have the capacity for it. So there's a definite
limit to how much information we can hold in mind at once. Now the original estimates of
just how much we can hold were around five to nine items and this comes from a very famous paper by
George Miller in 1956 that was titled "The magical number seven plus or minus two" suggesting that
most people could hold between five to nine items in their short term or their working memory.
This turns out to maybe be a little bit of an overestimate because what Miller was working with
was mostly things that people had experience with already. Things like strings of digits right or
color names and it turns out that this actually makes the tasks a little bit easier because
you know that you're trying to remember a number that you're already familiar with like
seven you're not going to mix that up with some random nonsense syllables or if you're remembering
the word orange that's a lot easier if you know that you're remembering color names. And so if I
gave you something that's truly new to you so I gave you maybe some foreign language words
that you've never heard before now you'd probably only be able to remember three or four syllables,
right? So it'll be much shorter and we'll come back to this idea in a few minutes. But the main
point is we have a very limited amount of space in our working memory capacity that we can work with
and that means we have to think about that when it comes to learning and studying. What exactly are
we filling our mental workspace with? This brings us to what's known as cognitive load theory.
Cognitive load theory comes from John Sweller and this is the idea that anything that you're
holding in mind is taking up some of your working memory capacity and it might not be particularly
relevant for the problem that you're trying to solve or what you're trying to accomplish.
Now a visual way of thinking about this comes from Barbara Oakley's book "A mind for Numbers" and in
this she gives the example of an octopus with a number of tentacles and the idea is each tentacle
can hold one item in your working memory capacity. So let's say you have four or five tentacles
once those are tied up once each one is holding an item then you can't pick up anything new you can
no longer take in new information. And so if some of your tentacles are used up for holding things
that aren't very important or aren't relevant to what you're trying to do then it would be better
to put those things down to get rid of those cognitive loads so that you could have more
tentacles available for what you're actually trying to do for what's actually relevant.
Now there are times when researchers will actually give people cognitive loads on purpose.They
actually want to tie up as much of their capacity as possible and the reason that they do this is to
make sure that a participant isn't thinking about something else. So if they give you a
task or a cognitive load that's going to take up all of your working memory capacity then we know
you aren't simultaneously thinking about something else. So the classic example of this in cognitive
psychology research is asking participants to count backwards by threes or by sevens
something they don't have a lot of practice with from a particular number so let's say I
just gave you a list of words uh and I don't want you to remember those words. I don't want you to
actively try to remember them and so to keep you from rehearsing them what I might do is ask you
to count backwards aloud so I can know what your working memory capacity is tied up with.
So after you read the list of words I might say okay now count backwards by sevens from 354.
So now you have to say 354 347 340 333 326 and the idea is if you're doing that then I can safely
assume that you're not also practicing the list of words because that task is difficult enough.
It's large enough of a cognitive load that it's going to tie up most of your resources. Okay so
what does this have to do with learning and studying? Well if you think about other contexts
you've probably experienced cases where you had a large cognitive load. So let's say you're working
on some math problem and maybe it's one of those word problems that has a lot of information in it
and you start working on a certain section of it and you kind of get lost right? You're calculating
something out maybe you get to some number and then you realize you don't know what that number's
for. You've kind of lost track of what it was or how you're going to use it for the next step
and this would be because your capacity was sort of overwhelmed. There was too much information
you couldn't pay attention to all of it at once and so maybe you got distracted or you got lost.
Or maybe it's happened to you when you're reading a novel. So let's say there's a scene in the novel
and there's a bunch of descriptions and there's a lot of new vocabulary that you're not really sure
what it means there's a bunch of new words and so you get kind of tied up on that your working
memory is all devoted to trying to figure out what these words mean. Maybe you're trying to
use context you're trying to figure it out and as a result you miss some important part of the scene
you're no longer able to also pay attention to the characterization or some detail that's going to
be relevant for the plot later. So these would be cases where there's a cognitive load that's
preventing you from staying focused on the most relevant part of what you're trying to do. This
is actually a critique that I have of some types of educational videos so sometimes there's just
too much going on for students to effectively stay focused on what's actually relevant what they're
actually trying to learn from the video. So maybe there's animations and then there's someone
talking there's also text and then maybe there's jumpcuts to other things and as a result it's kind
of jumbled and you don't really know what's the important thing. What am I supposed to focus on?
I think you also see this with poorly constructed Powerpoint slides you know where you'll have
images and animations and then maybe there's also large blocks of text which the audience can't help
but read when you put them on the screen and so they're reading that and they're looking at the
cartoons and all this time the speaker's also talking. And that means people probably aren't
able to take in all that information at once and so later what they remember might not actually be
what was relevant. They might remember the cartoon but not the key idea that the speaker was talking
about. So our memory capacity can quickly become exhausted and we want to make sure that we're
exhausting it with things that we actually want to accomplish. We want to make sure that the most
important things are what are taking up all the space in our working memory capacity. We
want to reduce any other cognitive loads any other distractions. So we don't want to tie up resources
with things that don't matter. You want to have a tight narrow focus only on what's important.
You can think of it as a laser beam versus a flashlight. If you're illuminating a bunch of
things that you don't actually need to see in order to solve the problem then those
other things would be cognitive loads that are going to interfere with your problem solving
and this can also help us to understand why google is not a solution to information overload.
Occasionally you'll hear people say that you no longer need to remember facts because everyone can
google everything. Unfortunately I've even heard educators say things like this. So what's wrong
with this idea? I mean isn't it true? I think it can be true that you can find most information on
google but it's also true that using google takes up some of your cognitive resources.
It takes up some of your working memory capacity. So just holding a term or a phrase long enough
to search for it is using up some precious cognitive resources and that's not to mention
all the resources that will then go into looking through the search results trying to determine
what's relevant making decisions about what you should click on. All of this is a cognitive load
and if your working memory capacity is tied up with this task then it's no longer on the main
concept or the idea that you're supposed to be thinking about. You've probably had this
experience where you've googled something and as you're looking through the results
you realize that you don't really know why you were googling this to begin with right? This is
a demonstration of a cognitive load. The task of searching for the information took up so much of
your working memory capacity that you didn't have any left to keep track of why you were doing it.
So if we constantly need to turn to google to look things up how well can we stay focused on
what we're actually trying to accomplish? This means that google isn't really the solution to
this problem of working memory having limitations having a limited capacity. So what can we do?
Unfortunately the answer isn't to increase our working memory capacity.
That would be nice but it doesn't seem to be possible. There's not really a
reliable research-backed way of increasing a human's overall working memory capacity
or to use Barbara Oakley's analogy we can't grow new tentacles in order to hold more items. But
there is a way that we can work with more information at once provided that it's in
a specific domain and this brings us to the idea of chunking. So let's say that I put up
a random string of letters. You'd probably be able to hold on to about five to nine of them.
You're familiar with letters so it's probably going to be in that magical number seven range.
But what if I put up words instead of letters? These are familiar words that you'd seen before
now you might be able to remember about five to nine words and that's a lot more
than five to nine letters. And then you might wonder well what if instead of words I used
common phrases that you were very familiar with each consisting of several words?
Now you might be able to recall five to nine phrases and that's certainly more than five to
nine words and it might be dozens of letters. So what's going on? Well it turns out that
the amount of space that things take up in your working memory capacity
is not fixed. It's true that you can always only hold a set number of items but what counts as an
item can be changed. It's malleable for you. You can decide what counts as an item.
Another way to think about this is that you can't increase the size of the workspace
but what you can do is decrease how much space things take up by making them more dense. You can
shrink the items down so that they have lots more information packed inside of them. Each item
contains lots of information and now you can manipulate a lot of information without having
changed your overall working memory capacity. So this example of chunking letters into words and
then chunking words into phrases in order to allow us to hold lots of information in a single item
in our working memory also shows us something else about working memory
and that's the difference between effortful processing and automatic processing.
Not only have you compressed the information down into these dense packets but you've also
automated the task of reading them. So new tasks require effort that means they take conscious
focus you actually have to think about what you're doing while you're doing it and that
means that's taking up space in your working memory capacity in order to think about it.
And when you first started learning to read reading was an effortful process.
You had to think about each of the letters in order to determine what word it was. But
as you practiced more and more you got better and better at this and eventually it became automatic.
Now if you look at a word you just read it. It doesn't feel like it takes any conscious effort
and that means it doesn't take up much space in your working memory capacity.
So now you have space left over you can think about other things while you're reading and that's
what you do when you read. You're reading a book and you're thinking about things that happened
before you're thinking about the characters maybe you're making predictions about what's going to
happen and that's very different from when you first learned how to read. When you're really just
thinking about maybe one word at a time and you'd get to the end of a sentence and you had no idea
what the sentence meant because each individual word was tying up all of your memory capacity.
So this ability for us to group information into these dense packets or chunks and then to
reduce the effort that it takes to do things by automating them
this is the difference between novices and experts and that's what we're going to talk
about in the next video when we think about expertise. But before we do that we're going to
summarize how we can apply some of these ideas from working memory to learning and studying.
Whatever it is that you're trying to learn you want to think about how you can automate this
process. You want to reduce as much as possible the strain on your working memory capacity.
So you want to think about what you're trying to learn. What are the chunks
that you can identify and then how can you automate the processing of those chunks?
So the first tip is to cut out any multitasking that might be a cognitive load. So
anything that might start eating into your working memory capacity and distracting you
needs to be ruthlessly eliminated. Having netflix running in the background listening
to music with lyrics that you can't help but start singing along to
maybe distracting phone notifications or a million open browser tabs that are distracting you
and keeping you from staying focused on one thing these are all things that you want to cut out.
Next you want to identify the most important aspects of what it is you're trying to learn
in the moment. What should the main focus of your working memory capacity be
at this time? Once you've identified that then you know what chunks you're trying to build. This
is known as deliberate practice and something we're going to talk about in the next video.
This might be an individual step of solving a problem or it might be thinking about the sequence
of steps that you're practicing once you've learned each step. Say okay now I'm thinking about
what is the sequence of steps for these problems or maybe you're practicing identifying
which approach to use: okay we've learned three different ways to solve problems in this chapter
and my main goal for today is thinking about how do I know when to use each approach.
And then you practice the approaches separately. In another class you might be thinking about
individual terms or vocabulary. My main focus now is just learning these new terms I'm not going to
worry too much about the broader concepts because that's going to overwhelm me. I'm just going to
focus on the new terms and then in my next session once the terms are well practiced I'll be able to
understand the concepts. Or maybe your focus is on the broader concept. You want to test
do I remember all the terms that are related to this? Or maybe you're thinking about multiple
broad concepts that are already well practiced and learned and now you're thinking about how do
these fit together? That's the main focus that's what I want to use my working memory capacity for.
And lastly you want to incorporate active retrieval. This is where you're using your
mind to come up with the answers as much as possible and that's going to ensure that
the appropriate things are in your working memory capacity. That you're actively thinking about them
you're not just looking over your notes you're actually thinking about it. You're coming up with
it on your own. That's going to be much more effective. Okay I hope you found this helpful
if so please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!