How Many Digits? A digit span can be increased by practice—you start at five and work your way up. A normal adult digit span is between five and seven. For children, the ability to memorize one digit per year of age is normal, so a two-year-old can remember two digits, a three-year-old can remember three, and so on.

Put simply, simple span tasks are commonly considered typical tasks for measuring short-term memory (which is considered passive and dedicated to item memorization), while complex span tasks are usually considered typical measures of working memory (which is assumed to involve information processing beyond that needed …

The Digit Span Task (Backwards-Only Child Version) measures working memory. It assesses children’s ability to hold information in short-term memory and manipulate that information to produce some result.

If chunking is a source of span variance, the tendency to chunk should be positively correlated with span. The principal measure of chunking in the present experiment was a well- established one that reflects error probabilities associated with the learning of structured (chunkable) number sequences.

The digit span test can also be given visually by displaying a series of numbers and then asking the person taking the test to verbally state the numbers and then to write them down in the correct order. This is referred to as the visual digit span test and can be administered either forward or backward.

Herman Ebbinghaus

Working Memory and Paying Attention Here, working memory skills help kids remember what they need to be paying attention to. Take, for example, doing a long division problem. Kids with weak working memory skills have trouble staying on task to get to the end result.

In the technical and interpretative manual of the WAIS- IV (Wechsler, 2008, p. 15), Digit Span Forward is described as a test involving “attention, encoding and auditory processing,” while the term WM is reserved for the Back- ward and Sequencing tasks as well as the Letter-Number Sequencing subtest.

For example, if you are trying to memorize a list of items, the recency effect means you are more likely to recall the items from the list that you studied last. This is one component of the serial position effect, a phenomenon in which the position of items on a list influences how well those items are recalled.

Serial-position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst. One suggested reason for the primacy effect is that the initial items presented are most effectively stored in long-term memory because of the greater amount of processing devoted to them.

In contrast, the primacy bias error occurs when an assessor’s selection is made based on information that was presented earlier (primary information) rather than later in a process.

The Primacy/Recency Effect is the observation that information presented at the beginning (Primacy) and end (Recency) of a learning episode tends to be retained better than information presented in the middle.