IUBio

Cowan (U. Missouri) on Working Memory (Cog Sci Dec. 6)

Stevan Harnad harnad at cogito.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Mon Oct 30 07:36:44 EST 2000


  You are invited to a talk co-sponsored by the Cognitive Sciences
  Centre, Psychology Department (Cognitive Research Group) and
  Department of Electronics and Computer Science (Intelligence, Agents,
  Multimedia Research Group) at SOUTHAMPTON UNIVERSITY.

        DATE:   Wednesday Dec 6th 
        TIME:   12:50 
        PLACE:  Shackleton Building Room 3095 

        http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/cowan.htm

        CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT OF WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY 

        Professor Nelson Cowan 
        Department of Psychology 
        University of Missouri 
        210 McAlester Hall Columbia 
        MO 65211 USA 
        CowanN at missouri.edu 
        http://web.missouri.edu/~psycowan 

        Visiting Professor 
        Department of Experimental Psychology 
        University of Bristol

      SUMMARY: "Working memory" is that small amount of information
      that we can hold in mind at a particular moment, to be used in
      understanding language and in solving problems of various sorts.
      Three properties may be basic to the operation of working memory:
      (1) our capacity to focus attention, (2) how much information can
      be retrieved into the focus of our attention and (3) how long
      information outside the focus of our attention can stay active. I
      will discuss how these three properties can be be measured and
      how they change during childhood.

  Cowan, N. (2001) The Magical Number 4 in Short-term Memory: A
  Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity. Behavioral and Brain
  Sciences 24 (1)
  http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.cowan.html

  Miller, G.A. (1956). The magical number 7, plus or minus two: Some
  limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological
  Review, 63, 81-97.
  http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/07/30/

	   NELSON COWAN (Ph.D. 1980, University of Wisconsin - Madison)
	   is Middlebush Professor of the Social Sciences, in the
	   Department of Psychology at the University of Missouri -
	   Columbia. He has written one book (Cowan, N., 1995,
	   Attention and memory: An integrated framework, Oxford
	   University Press) and edited another (1997, The development
	   of memory in childhood, Psychology Press), and has 100 other
	   publications on working memory, its development, and its
	   relation to attention. He is former Associate Editor of the
	   Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
	   Cognition (1995-1999) and won the 1998 University of
	   Missouri Chancellor Award for Research and Creative
	   Activities.







More information about the Neur-sci mailing list

Send comments to us at biosci-help [At] net.bio.net