Working Memory Problems

Place 1 lb. chopped watermelon, 1/2 cup pineapple juice, 1/2 cup white rum, 1/4 cup triple sec liqueur and 1 tsp. grenadine in the jug of a blender and blend until smooth. This is the recipe for Watermelon Mai Tai. But as simple as it seems, following a recipe would be impossible without working memory. Working memory is your mental workspace. It holds information in your head and allows you to manipulate it mentally. Poor working memory can affect long-term academic success and prevent you from reaching your true potential.

Learning Disabilities

• "Working memory is a bit like a mental jotting pad and how good this is in someone will either ease their path to learning or seriously prevent them from learning," says psychologist Tracy Alloway from Durham University's School of Education. Alloway and her team conducted a screening study of over 3,000 students. Of these, 10 percent were found to have working memory impairments that resulted in below age-expected performance on English and math tests. They also had poor attention span and experienced forgetfulness and difficulties following teacher instructions. Alloway speculates that impairments to working memory are largely genetic.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

• Working memory dysfunction may be one of the main underpinnings of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). According to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV, a person is diagnosed with ADHD when six or more of the following symptoms are present for more than six months: forgetfulness, absent-mindedness, carelessness, short attention span, difficulty listening, difficulty following instructions, trouble organizing activities and dislike of mental tasks. "It could be that working-memory problems give rise to observable behavioral symptoms of ADHD: distractibility and also poor academic achievement," says Rosemary Tannock, a psychologist and psychiatry professor at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. She believes that training the working-memory capacity of people with ADHD can help to avoid long-term learning disabilities and poor academic performance.

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two

• In the 1950s, George Miller, a psychology professor at Princeton University, discovered that people can only hold between five and nine items in their working memory at any one time. The research was published in "Psychological Review" under the title "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" and was one of the main inspirations behind the so-called "global workspace model of the mind." According to the model, the mind contains an executive "desktop" with workable information. An item in working memory can be a digit, a letter or a tone, or a more complex pattern such as a word or phone number. While we can only hold a limited number of items in our heads at any one time, we can hold indefinitely more complex items by using a process called "chunking." For example, the six-letter string "FBICIA" might count as two items for someone familiar with U.S. intelligence agencies, and the eight-letter string "LOLXOSYS" might count as three items for someone familiar with Internet slang.

A Workout for Working Memory

• The latest research on working memory shows that Miller set the number too high. More realistically, people can hold between one and four items in working memory. But one can increase the capacity with training, reports psychology professor Paul Verhaeghen from Syracuse University. Verhaeghen and his colleagues found that the working memory capacity of participants subjected to memory-training tasks over a five-day period had expanded from one to four items. Verhaeghen's findings suggest that there is not a set limit to working memory. Torkel Klingberg, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Stockholm Brain Institute, conducted a study of 53 children with ADHD. Half the participants were given working-memory tasks that gradually increased in difficulty. The other half were given tasks that did not get harder over time. At the end of the study the first group performed significantly better on working-memory tests.

Spam Filter Glitches

• An effective spam filter prevents pointless clutter from enterin your "inbox." Without one, it could take hours to get the information you actually need. Poor working memory is like a cluttered inbox rather than an almost-empty inbox, reports Klingberg in "Nature Neuroscience." Low-capacity people with poor working memory can hold more total information in working memory than high-capacity people. But most of the information is task-irrelevant spam cluttering their minds. Klingberg and his postdoctoral research fellow Fiona McNab compared low-capacity participants with those of high-capacity. The participants were asked to remember items on a computer screen with different colored squares. The researchers found that the areas of the brain involved in reason, planning and updating became more active during categorization-memory tasks in participants with good working memory but remained at the same level in low-capacity participants. The research indicates that training programs that improve working memory don't expand its capacity. Instead they reduce spam by updating the brain's spam filters.