A Comparative Study On Working Memory In Processing And Storage Between Undergraduate And Junior College Students

Working memory (working memory, WM) is one of the most important concepts of modern cognitive psychology, the core, Baddeley (1986) defined working memory as limited energy of information systems or mechanism which relate to information processing and maintenance relation with current task in addressing cognitive process. Theoretical basis of the research is two models of working memory, individual differences in working memory, relationship between working memory and learning ability, paradigm of working memory, this study also describes and analyzes the above theories, to support the subsequent experimental study in theory.the paper contains three experiments, they are: the difference of short-term memory between undergraduate and junior college students; the effect of increased memory and load on working memory to resources implications; Individual differences in working memory between undergraduate and junior college students, it tests memory selective variances of positive words and negative words with the objective of working memory class vocabulary words, results are as follows:Experiment 1, measurement on the short-term memory and their mathematics and Chinese scores in college entrance examination of undergraduates and junior college students found that: the storage of short-term memory, mathematics scores, total scores of college entrance examination are significant higher than junior college students, the storage of short-term memory has significant positive correlation with math score, but it don't have significant correlation with Chinese and total college entrance exam scores. Experiment 2, by dual-task working memory paradigm, this part tests the differences of undergraduate and junior college students in storage of working memory, amounts of memory vocabulary, processing accuracy, reaction time measurement under the condition of interference or not, association or not, the results are as follows: the increased load of memory will take up more working memory resources, reduce working memory resources, while working memory load increases will decline allocation resources of working memory capacity. The working memory of College Students and undergraduates is more a difference in the face of irrelevant information in the interference, differences effects of interference suppression shows that undergraduates extracts related information from background more easily.Experiment 3, by the double task of working memory paradigm, this part test if there are differences on subjects of positive words and negative words, working memory capacity, working memory accuracy, and reaction time, the results show: individual remembers positive vocabulary are more than the objective vocabulary word, the accuracy of positive words and reaction time are significant less, the phenomenon can be explained by "expectation effect" or "mood congruency effect".Overall, the results of this study support the working memory resource allocation assumption, that is, the storage and processing are both occupying the limited resources, when the memory load increases, available resources in processing tasks will reduce, this will lead to the declining of reaction time or accuracy.