SPATIAL WORKING MEMORY

Spatial Working Memory



Spatial Working Memory

Introduction

Theories of spatial working memory have been developed from empirical studies of healthy children and from neuropsychological investigations of individuals who suffer from cognitive deficits as a result of brain damage. Most theories agree that spatial working memory is a limited capacity system that maintains information over periods of seconds. However, theories differ as to the detailed architecture and functioning of the spatial working memory system.

n recent years there have been great advances in our understanding of this subject, which seems to be much more complex than previously thought. The spatial component of working memory has been studied from multiple perspectives, and the knowledge we have both behavioral and psycho-physiological has made great strides thanks to technology and new techniques that have computing and image acquisition.

In addition, the view that spatial working memory is no more than the activation of information in long-term memory is not consistent with the selective impairment of memory resources observed in individuals who suffer from cognitive deficits as a result of brain damage. For example, some children demonstrate very poor performance on immediate memory tasks, but normal performance on memory tasks involving the long-term retention of information. Conversely, others have shown normal immediate memory performance with poor retrieval from long-term memory, or poor long-term learning.

Discussion

This paper deals with testing the hypothesis for a developmental psychologist, he was interested in children's construction play and the factors which determined the ease with which children are able to construct models. He has designed a study in which children were tested for Spatial Working Memory and then presented with a series of Lego models of varying complexity to build at age of 8 retested when they were 12 years old.

Spatial Working Memory scores at age 8 were used to categorize the children as having either high or low spatial ability. As the psychological literature suggests that there are sex differences in spatial ability he also noted the sex of each of his participants. During both Lego tasks all participants were presented with 8 models in random order, which were designed to be of varying difficulty, a mean time taken to assemble the models was calculated. Data were collected across a range of variables, some of which are presented here.

We will be analyzing the below mentioned hypothesis with independent sample t test, the data set comprise of 80 individuals including male and female. Importantly, even apparently independent memory systems, such as spatial working memory, are affected by the type of information to be remembered. Memory span is not a domain-general phenomenon that is essentially identical irrespective of what is being remembered.

Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive statistics are commonly encountered, relatively simple, and for the most part easily understood. Most of the statistics encountered in daily life, in newspapers and magazines, in television, radio, and Internet news reports, and so forth, are descriptive in nature rather than inferential. Compared with the logic of inferential statistics, most descriptive statistics are somewhat ...