Tracy Packiam Alloway, PhD

Have you noticed that your daughter is a whiz at remembering lyrics to a song yet can never remember her multiplication tables? Do you find that your son can recite lines from a movie but can’t follow simple instructions? Why is it that your child can spend hours playing a video game but gets frustrated after a short time on their homework?

Working memory is the answer.

Working memory is our brain’s ‘post-it note’. We make mental scribbles of bits of information we need to remember and also work with that information. For example, if you were baking a cake that fed only two people, but you had four people coming to dinner, you need working memory to remember the ingredients and to multiply them in your head so that everyone gets a slice. Without it we would be lost literally, we wouldn’t be able to juggle directions in our head to get to that important meeting at a new location and would forget important phone numbers and contacts. Working memory is just as critical for a variety of activities at school, from complex tasks like reading comprehension and mental math, to simple activities such as navigating around the school and taking the right books for homework.

Do you have a question on working memory? Let me know.