Working memory

Reading the Times, working memory blow-out edition

~ Catherine ~ 1 Comment

Do news stories today demand more working memory than in the past?

Reading the news these days, I find myself not infrequently having to backtrack to remind myself who a particular actor is and what he or she is doing in the story. Last Friday’s piece on the imploded submarine was a particular challenge, with at least 15 different proper names, several of which appear more than once:

  1. Richard Stockton Rush III
  2. Guillermo Sohnlein
  3. Elon Musk
  4. Adam Wright
  5. Louise Davies
  6. Charles Conrad Jr.
  7. Wendy Weil
  8. Isidor Straus
  9. Ida Straus
  10. Graham Hawkes
  11. David Lochridge
  12. Karl Stanely
  13. Will Kohnen
  14. Andrew Von Kerens
  15. Alan Stern

Working memory holds roughly 3 items at a time, so 14 brand-new names (Musk excluded) is far too many. This is especially true because an overloaded working memory completely overwrites itself: when you push one too many items into working memory, everything gets erased, not just one old item to make way for one new item. Or so I read. It certainly feels that way.

Worse yet, I’m not sure we have much choice over what we do and do not store as we read. Isador and Ida Straus, numbers 8 and 9 on the list, are a sideshow; we don’t see them again. But those two names play havoc with memory for the novel names that came before and do reappear. At least, they do for me.

Has journalism changed?

I don’t remember having to rehearse names while reading the Times back in the day, and I’m pretty sure the problem isn’t me.

OceanGate Founder Pushed to Expand Deep Sea Travel Despite Chorus of Concerns by Shawn Hubler, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Anna Betts 6/23/2023

How many words do you need to know ?

~ Catherine ~ 13 Comments

Research indicates that if the students know about 98% of the words on a page, then they can read it quickly and with high levels of comprehension. Below 90% (one unknown word in 10) the reading becomes frustrating and slow requiring a lot of dictionary use and comprehension suffers badly.
The Extensive Reading Foundation’s Guide to Extensive Reading

I first came across this research while teaching English 109, and it sure corresponds to my experience. 

If my students knew just 90% of the words in a text, they couldn’t read it at all, even with the definitions of new vocabulary words typed in the margins. 

I’m sure the problem is working memory.

Every time you look up a new word you have to remember a) what you were just reading, b) the ‘name’ of the new word, and c) the new word’s definition.

Plus you have to moosh all these things together into a meaningful whole, an operation that is also performed by working memory.

And since you know only 90% of the words, you have to do this over and over again, which erodes your memory of the other words you just looked up, not to mention your memory (and, consequently, your understanding) of the essay as a whole. 

It’s like trying to multiply 79 by 6 inside your head. You have to remember the 79, you have to remember the 6, you have to remember the subproducts (is that the right word ? I don’t remember !), and you have to perform the calculation. 

It’s too much.

This is why schools should teach vocabulary.