The Effects Of Cognitive Load And The Decay Of Memory Trace On Adults' Spatial Working Memory Span

The span of working memory was one of the fundamental problems in working memory.It was defined the numbers or units of previous learning items that participants couldcorrectively remind in a specific task or a paradigm of the span of working memory. The spanof working memory was limited so that the resource-sharing theory and the trail of memorytheory competitively tried to explain the reason of limitation of cognitive resource. Such twotheories existed great divergence on the question. The research was to explore the effect ofcognitive load and the trail of memory on the span of working memory by using the paradigmof spatial working memory with setting different cognitive load and long or short processingtime. Experiment 1 using the paradigm of independent spatial working memory task was tocompare the effects of different cognitive load on the span of spatial working memory ofparticipants when the processing time is constant. The results suggested cognitive loadsignificantly affects the span of spatial working memory of participants. Experiment 2investigates the effects of high or low cognitive load on the span of spatial working memorywhen the processing time is constant by taking advantaging of the paradigm of dependentspatial working memory. It showed the cognitive load could influence the performance ofparticipants on the task of the span of spatial working memory. Experiment 3 found thatcognitive load influenced performance of participants in the task of spatial working memoryrather than the processing time when we manipulated simultaneously the cognitive load andprocessing time. Such these results further expanding the explanation of time–based resource-sharing model.