Effects of Individual Factors and Recall Direction on Working Memory Span

Recently, working memory span has received much attention from researchers. Memory materials in previous studies are usually in the form of text or pattern to explore people’s working memory capacity and duration, with few researches on working memory span. Thus, this article aims to explore the impact of individual factors and recall direction on one’s working memory span. In this study, two sets of digital memory materials were presented randomly, and 12 participants were invited to memorize the numbers and retell the numbers they remembered in required orders: forward recall and backward recall. At the same time, the BD-II-407 Memory Span Tester was applied to record the indicators of participants’ working memory span such as “score”, “time”, “number of errors” and “number of digits memorized”, then statistical methods was used to analyze the data. The results show that individual factors and recall direction both have a significant effect on working memory span, and the participants’ performance during the backward-recall task was superior to that during the forward-recall task, especially when the memory materials become too long. Findings of this study will help people have a better learning of working memory span. Besides, follow-up studies need a more rationally structured sample and more scientific memory materials to further explore the effects of individual physiological factors and types of memory techniques on working memory span.