Feasibility Research On Experimental Measurement Of Working Memory

Working memory (WM) is the central part of human intelligence, and it is a hot study of Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. WM is a limited resource system that has simultaneous storage and processing. Individual difference in the ability to control attention is the major contributor to individual differences in WM. Baddeley (2001) referred to such individual differences as "the most prominent feature in research on the topic (of working memory) in North America".Nowadays, there are many studies about individual difference of WM. But standard measurements of WM are not design. This paper wishes to innovate on design and workflow of working memory. Based on above, this paper designs computer tasks in order to measure WM with a dynamic experiment. Experiment includes WM span task, n-back task, Stroop task and mental arithmetic task. These four tasks all are classic measurements of WM. The paper wishes to find the best measure scope of every task. Meanwhile, the paper divides subjects into 3 levels-high, medium and low- and gets the scope of every level through recording RT and correct data of the four tasks.Experiment show that, the performance of every task can't be affected by age, sex and major; the four tasks could be measurements of collage students which age between 18-24 old; the performance is also great by changing the stimulus into Chinese words in WM span task; in the audio mental arithmetic task, the RT and correct have an intense change when reaching 6-7 arithmetic.One goal of this paper is to build a measurement tool of WM, experiment time and efficiency should be thought about. This paper studies the best scope of every task. The result is 5-8 scope of WM span task, 3-4 scope of n-back task, the 2nd and 4th subtasks of Stroop task, 4-7 arithmetic of audio mental arithmetic task and 5-9 arithmetic of visual mental arithmetic task.