Memory span
The memory span is the number of elements that a living being can simultaneously compare or relate to one another in any logical way. The larger the memory span or immediate retention , the more complicated thinking becomes possible.
When speaking to a person a number of monosyllabic words before, eg "horse", "dog", "cow", "sheep" and so on - each word only once and the next at intervals of one second - and calls on the subject then repeating the words, it turns out that an adult can memorize an average of seven ( 7 ± 2 ) words. (Miller, 1956) The result can always be confirmed, for example when repeating simple random numbers. The relationship between memory span, intelligence and short storage capacity or performance of working memory seems to exist regularly.
overview
The memory span is small in young children, only two or three, and then increases by an element about every two years in intelligent children. It was the psychologist Jean Piaget who recognized the importance of memory span and who proposed that the maturation of thinking in children is causally related to the increase in memory span. Gifted children have a memory span of five when they start school.
The possibilities of processing several elements at the same time can also be increased methodically. By incorporating several elements into an overall context, they can be viewed in an increased amount. If a test person builds the terms “horse”, “dog”, “cow”, ... into the larger unit “farm”, then this serves as an expanding support for short-term memory . The terms can be viewed and examined together.
Such a formation of units of meaning, ultimately of complexes, also forms the basis of higher thought processes. A reduction of the information as well as a larger perspective is gained.
This basic type of information processing, also known as chunking , not only leads to an apparent exceeding of the seven threshold, but also to the inclusion and exploration of widely ramified information structures.
The testing of the memory span in different variants (e.g. playback of number sequences forwards or backwards or in the middle of a continuous series of numbers) has been an integral part of numerous intelligence tests for about 100 years .
A typical example of the formation of information units from apparently incoherent characters far beyond the 7th threshold is, among other things, letter-based writing and, for the basic tests with number sequences, the use of memory techniques with which pairs of numbers or triples of numbers are assigned certain meanings.
The latter in particular may quickly be dismissed as a “trick”, but on closer inspection, such an application reveals exactly what is constantly happening at a higher level: the formation of meaningful units to overcome the threshold of seven sub-units. It is precisely such techniques that illustrate, on a small scale, one of the fundamental functions of our thinking.
On the question of the extent to which the loci method , which is always associated with such techniques, but which must be distinguished from them, i.e. the spatial arrangement of information for better storage and processing, is also automatically used in thought processes and to what extent this can support information acquisition and processing, if necessary, There are disagreements among regular users of the method as well as among psychologists. Clearly structured studies on this are still lacking.
See also
literature
- Fritz Süllwold: Immediate retention and its psychological significance. Hogrefe, Göttingen 1964