Measuring Short Term Memory Span By Investigating The Relationship Between Digital And Spatial Span Tasks.
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ABSTRACT
The purpose of this experiment was to measure short term memory span by looking into the relationship between two span tasks: digital and spatial. The experiment measured digit span and spatial span for each participant by carrying out two trials of each task out at the end of which the participants noted their scores down. The participants task was to recall the sequence of the spatial blocks and digits. After the two tasks were completed the correlation between the two tasks and their scores was calculated and the participants memory span was calculated. The results demonstrated that spatial span and digital span tasks had a moderate correlation.
INTRODUCTION
Memory is the ability of the brain to store, retain, and subsequently recall information (wikipedia.org). Memory allows a person to use and recall information when it is most needed. Short--term memory, sometimes referred to as "primary" or "active" memory, is that part of memory which stores a limited amount of information for a limited amount of time (roughly 15-30 seconds). This can be contrasted to long-term memory, in which a seemingly unlimited amount of information is stored indefinitely (wikipedia.org).
The capacity of short term memory is finite. George Miller argued that human short-term memory has a forward memory span of approximately seven items plus or minus two (Miller, 1956). Miller pointed out, going against the trend of the 1950s in order to understand cognition in an information theoretic context that the capacity of short-term memory cannot be measured in terms of a constant amount of information, as expressed in bits. Seven years before Miller, Donald Hebb in 1949 argued that short term memory and long term...
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