Short storage capacity

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The short-term storage is, according to a model of the so-called Erlanger School of Information Psychology , the actual physical dimension of intelligence distinguished.

The capacity C of the “ working memory ” of human short-term memory (measured in bits ) is the product of the information processing  speed S (in bits per second) and the memory span  D in seconds:

${\displaystyle C[Bit]=S[Bit/s]\cdot D[s]}$

While the intelligence quotient (IQ) is a relative quantity related to the mean value of a certain population, the short storage capacity has the advantage of being an absolute quantity.

The physicist Helmar Frank , who published his first book on this subject in 1962, was given the task in his dissertation of thinking about the problem of how much information a person can absorb and mentally process in a complex art performance, such as a stage design and how much just rushes by. Frank came up with the idea of ​​understanding the permeability of the human mind and also its ability to learn as a channel capacity in analogy to the theory of Claude Shannon . In this way he arrived at the definition of short storage capacity.

On this theoretical basis, the psychologist Siegfried Lehrl developed the short test of general intelligence , later the short test for general basic quantities of information processing (KAI), in which the information processing speed is measured as reading speed . Other researchers measure the speed of information processing as a choice reaction time between simple action alternatives .

The short storage capacity, and thus the IQ, should be related to the energy- spectral density of the electroencephalogram (EEG) at evoked potentials and to the energy metabolism of the brain .

In standardized tests, people with an IQ of 130 have a short storage capacity of 140 bits, those with an IQ of 112 have 105 bits and those with an IQ of 94 have 70 bits. From such data it can be seen that the short storage capacity, unlike the IQ, is not normalized to the Gaussian distribution . Instead, it has a log-normal distribution .

literature

• Siegfried Lehrl, Adolf Gallwitz, Lothar Blaha, Bernd Fischer: Theory and measurement of mental performance with the short test KAI . The general basic parameters of information processing. Vless, Ebersberg 1991, ISBN 3-88562-041-3 .
• Paul Kline: The Handbook of Psychological Testing . The GDP. 2nd Edition. Routledge, London 2000, ISBN 0-415-21157-3 , pp. 639 (English).
• Helmar G. Frank: educational cybernetics . A brief introduction to the cybernetic-pedagogical model fundamentals of educational technology. 2nd Edition. Akademia Libroservo, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-929061-80-5 (German, Esperanto).