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About Working Memory is your free online resource for information, research and news about working memory and its daily importance to people of all ages and walks of life.
What is Working Memory?
Working memory is a key cognitive function used in daily life that allows individuals to hold information in mind—“online”—for brief periods of time, typically a few seconds.
Why is Working Memory Important?
Recent scientific research conducted at universities in the U.S., Canada and Europe demonstrates that working memory is one of our most crucial cognitive capabilities, essential for countless daily tasks like following directions, remembering information momentarily, complex reasoning or staying focused on a project. More importantly, this broadened understanding of the importance of working memory can provide great hope to a range of people who suffer from working memory deficits, including children and adults with attention problems, people with learning disabilities, and stroke victims among others.
How do we use Working Memory?
As technology continues to place endless amounts of information at our fingertips, working memory has become even more essential to our ability to function successfully since it allows us to focus our  attention and organize and prioritize the things we do every day.
- Socially, you use it in the moment you are meeting someone and hearing their name for the first time.
- Academically, it is used when you’re reading and find it hard to comprehend what you've just read and have to reread material.
- Professionally, working memory is what drives your ability to concentrate and not lose your train of thought.
Living with a poor working memory would be like running many software programs simultaneously on a computer with little random access memory (RAM) — it would be slow, frustrating and very inefficient. In short, it wouldn’t work the way it needed to.
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