The Study On The Mental Arithmetic And Working Memory Span For Students Of Grade 5

In the 1970s, cognitive psychology began as an independent study mental theme. Mental arithmetic is a kind of complex psychological activity, in the process of calculation, need for information processing, and still need to store information. Working memory is the cognitive psychology research of mental arithmetic which is a major aspect. Working memory is responsible for the information processing and storage system, which have very good prediction effect of complex cognitive activities, and working memory span tasks can be very good response on working memory capacity.In order to explore the relation between mental arithmetic ability and working memory span for students of Grade 5, we designed two tasks for experiment. In experiment 1, through the test, selected mental arithmetic capacity of 30 children, and with normal mental arithmetic ability of the match in Grade 5. Subjects finished the working memory span task at first, and then complete mental arithmetic tasks. Working memory span tasks include digital working memory span and visual-spatial working memory span. Mental arithmetic tasks was designed different surface forms, different difficulty of mental arithmetic tasks. The experiment adopt mixture of experimental design, at first we analyzed the mental arithmetic experiment results with repeated measurements of variance analysis, the results showed that the main effect of subject type is significant, the surface forms of mental arithmetic with main effect is not significant, and the difficulty of mental arithmetic task with main effect is significant. Between working memory span and mental arithmetic which is correlation in analysis results, working memory span and mental arithmetic scores with further regression analysis found that digital working memory span into a regression equation. Experimental result showed that working memory span have effect on mental arithmetic scores, and the role of digital working memory span is greater than the role of visual-spatial working memory span.In the experiment 2, we used compute-paced working memory span tasks that enabled us to control for both processing load processing time of the tasks. So we could easily find out how these variables influence working memory span. Experimenta 2 include simple span task and complex span task (task complex levels represents the cognitive load of processing components), simple span task used of digital working memory span, and complex span task is within the range of ten with three digit Numbers addition and subtraction. Experiment 2 was adopted in within subject design. We analyzed the results of the experiment with analysis of variance, the results showed that the main effect of processing load and the main effect of processing time was significant. It was means that processing load and processing time had affect on working memory span.