Short-term Memory - Other Uses
Other Uses for Short-Term Memory
This week we will look at other ways we short-term memory in our everyday lives.
Updating what Changes Around Us
Another thing short-term memory does for us is keep abreast of what happens around us.
Can you imagine if you had to commit everything in your surrounds to memory. It would be like taking a photo of the world around us every second. But why do this? Most of the time, nothing changes.
Our short-term memory maintains an image of what is around us and updates things as they change. How cool is that?
Stops us ending up standing at the fridge without knowing why…most of the time
We’ve all been there. Standing at the fridge. Holding the door open. The light on. The cold air streaming out…and absolutely no idea why we are there or what we wanted from the fridge!
Part of the short-term memory’s job is to prevent this from happening.
It holds our plans and goals in mind for what we are doing at the moment. By doing this, it guides what we do toward those goals.
Keeping track of conversations
Every tried to use a voice assistant on a phone or computer? Unless they have dramatically improved between me writing this and you reading this, you’ll probably agree that they have a ways to go.
For example.
“Where is the nearest KFC?”.
“The nearest KFC is 2 kms to the north”
“Take me there”
“Where would you like me to take you?”
The computer has forgotten what you said the sentence before. (I know that the smart people that make our tech have made great improvements in this, but it makes a good example.)
Our short-term memory keeps track of references and topics in a conversation and helps us to connect words like ‘him’ to the name ‘James’ in the previous sentence or ‘there’ to ‘KFC’ in the earlier example.
So short term memory, is like our sketchpad. It helps us remember small amounts of information for a short amount of time. We use it everyday. We use it to help with everyday tasks. We use it to direct our behaviour.
However, its strengths are also its weaknesses. We can’t use it to remember things for a long time and we can’t use it to store a lot of information. This is where long-term memory steps in. We’ll look at this next week
Photo by neirfy/iStock / Getty Images