Working Memory Capacity: Essays in Cognitive Psychology

The idea of one's memory 'filling up' is a humorous misconception of how memory in general is thought to work; it is actually thought to have no capacity limit. However, the idea of a 'full brain' makes more sense with reference to working memory, which is the limited amount of information a person can hold temporarily in an especially accessible form for use in the completion of ongoing cognitive tasks. Nelson Cowan's work outlines ways in which participants in an experiment can be prevented from grouping/chunking the information in a task. This book tackles the problem of working memory capacity limits and the future of research on this topic. This book will be invaluable to working memory researchers and cognitive psychologists interested in memory.