Short-term memory (English) is a kind of memory. Compared with long-term memory, short-term memory has shorter storage time and limited storage capacity.
Duration of short-term memory: The most important feature of short-term memory is that the information retention time is quite limited. Without retelling, most information is kept in short-term memory for a short time, usually 5-20 seconds, and the longest time is no more than 1 minute. Short-term memory is sometimes called phone number memory, just like people dial the phone number immediately after finding it, and then forget it immediately after making the call. If you want to keep the information entered into short-term memory for a long time, you must repeat it through the internal speech form-either loudly or silently.
Capacity of short-term memory: The second key concept related to short-term memory is its capacity, also known as memory span. The capacity of short-term memory is very limited. 1956, American psychologist G. Miller published a paper entitled "magic number 7 plus or minus 2: some limitations of our ability to process information". According to the experimental results of randomly repeating a table with 3 to 12 digits, it is found that the maximum amount of short-term memory that subjects can recall after a presentation of information-the capacity of short-term memory is generally 7 2 units. Children's memory span is more limited, usually 4 1 unit. The short-term memory span measured by China scholars is that unrelated Chinese characters can remember 6 words, 7 decimals and 5 lines at a time. Memory span is also related to the nature of memory materials and the degree of coding processing of materials. If the memory material is meaningful, relevant and humanized.
As we are familiar with, the memory span will increase.
Short-term memory and long-term memory: the information in short-term memory has a short retention time and limited capacity. At this time, if new memory activities are inserted, the information exceeds the capacity or is not repeated, the information will rapidly decline, be forgotten and be unrecoverable. However, if repeated, the weak information that is about to disappear can be re-strengthened, become clear and stable, and then can be transferred to long-term memory maintenance after careful retelling. Therefore, retelling is the key to transfer information from short-term memory to long-term memory.
These definitions come from the Chinese version of Wikipedia. Ladies and gentlemen, please pay attention to my highlighted text.
We usually pile up too many information elements on the home page, whether it is modules, items, pictures and so on. When users browse websites, they look for the content they are interested in within the short-term memory. More than 50 years ago, scientists told us that our clever brains only remembered seven groups of ups and downs for various purposes. 1956, Miller put forward the concept of "chunk" in the article "Wonderful number 7 2-the limit of information processing". Later, cognitive psychologists of information processing adopted this concept. Miller believes that each chunk can be a letter, a word or a phrase. The amount of information contained in chunking is closely related to the chunking process. The process of chunking is influenced by individual knowledge and experience. The process of chunking is generally carried out in two aspects: one is to combine individual projects that are very close in time and space; The second is to use previous knowledge to form meaningful chunks of a single project. Because of this, there are individual differences in memory capacity.
The screen length of the home page is not the most important. How many blocks are there on the home page, how to combine blocks with a single project in space, and how to make full use of users' existing knowledge to form blocks are all issues that we should continue to consider and discuss. It is easier to define everything with a quantitative index, and now we have the number 7.
The following article also discusses the influence of lexical chunks on short-term memory in a simple way, and makes a simple explanation with newspaper media, and what we want to do is to apply this theory to website design.
In the whole reading process, there is a psychological activity that is busy silently for readers, that is, short-term working memory. This kind of psychological activity is difficult for people to consciously realize, but it is a basic psychological activity that people must rely on for their advanced cognitive activities. Short-term working memory, also known as short-term memory, keeps information for about one minute, which is a transitional stage from information to long-term memory, and it is temporary, dynamic and operational for information storage. Some people compare it to a workbench. When people are engaged in cognitive processing activities, some related necessary information is brought to the workbench as tools or raw materials to operate, and the processed information enters long-term memory and becomes human knowledge and experience. Thus, whether browsing headlines and subheadings, looking for important information or understanding the full text, newspaper readers' effective reading activities, especially fast reading, are inseparable from the basic psychological activities of short-term working memory.
A large number of psychological experiments show that the capacity of short-term working memory, that is, the information processing "workbench", is limited, and its capacity is 7 2, and the unit is chunks. Chunks, which may be a syllable, a letter, a group of words, a group of numbers, or a tune or a picture, are actually an information organization or recoding. When the chunk is too large, the capacity of 7 2 will be relatively reduced. "Chunk theory" was put forward by American psychologist Miller, who believed that the smallest unit to measure short-term memory was chunk. Chunk is an index item that can quickly link information in long-term memory, and it also refers to the familiar information unit. Lexical chunks largely depend on the subject's knowledge and experience. Different knowledge background, different chunking methods and different chunking sizes. Experiments show that the memory chunks of experts in specific fields are much larger than those of ordinary people.
To analyze the division, organization and editing of long newspaper articles with "chunk theory" and "metacognition theory" is actually to organize scattered information points in the articles into coded idiom blocks. A small column heading or subtitle and one or two paragraphs below it form a large block. Let these chunks become clues for effective reading and provide basis for the monitoring process of metacognition.
If there are too many chunks, more than 7 2, which exceeds the capacity of short-term working memory, it will be difficult for readers to effectively integrate information in reading, reading clues will be fragmented and confused, and reading monitoring will lose its basis. In this case, readers often feel that they are caught in a reading trap. Accordingly, our explanation for the above-mentioned compulsive over-segmentation is that newspaper editors tend to ignore readers' psychological laws of reading because they strongly hope to achieve readability. In addition, if the chunk is too large, it will also cause reading burden to readers, because we can't assume that readers are experts. Therefore, in newspaper editing, especially in long draft editing, in order to achieve readability, we must grasp the degree of a problem scientifically and locally, so as to achieve the best effect.