A cognitive system that temporarily holds and manipulates information needed to complete tasks.
Working memory is a psychology concept closely related to cognitive load.
Takeaways
- Working memory is limited to 4-7 chunks of information at any given moment with each chunk fades after 20-30 seconds. We use it to keep track of information in order to achieve tasks but we often have trouble remembering what information we’ve already seen. Designers must be mindful of this limit when displaying information to users and ensure it’s both necessary and relevant.
- Our brains are good at recognizing something we’ve seen before but not at keeping new information ready to be used. We can support recognition over recall by making it clear what information has already been viewed (e.g. visually differentiating visited links and providing breadcrumbs links).
- Place burden of memory on the system, not the user. We can lessen the burden of memorizing critical information by carrying it over from screen to screen when necessary (e.g. comparison tables that make comparing multiple items easy).
Origins
The term “working memory” was coined by George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, and was used in the 1960s in the context of theories that likened the mind to a computer. In 1968, Richard C. Atkinson and Richard M. Shiffrin used the term to describe their “short-term store”. The term short-term store was the name previously used for working memory. Other suggested names were short-term memory, primary memory, immediate memory, operant memory, and provisional memory. Short-term memory is the ability to remember information over a brief period (in the order of seconds). Most theorists today use the concept of working memory to replace or include the older concept of short-term memory, marking a stronger emphasis on the notion of manipulating information rather than mere maintenance.
The earliest mention of experiments on the neural basis of working memory can be traced back to more than 100 years ago, when Eduard Hitzig and Sir David Ferrier described ablation experiments of the prefrontal cortex (PFC); they concluded that the frontal cortex was important for cognitive rather than sensory processes. In 1935 and 1936, Carlyle Jacobsen and colleagues were the first to show the deleterious effect of prefrontal ablation on delayed response.