How Crossword Puzzles and Visual Cues are Linked to Short-Term Memory Capacity
Memories encode through steps of sensory memory to short-term memory to long-term memory. Within this process, attention is drawn to keep retaining information. Attention can be from associating an action or an image with the memory. Once an encoding of that memory happens, it is able to be stored in long term memory. Raphel, Matsukura, and Zerr et al. all show how short-term memory encodes memories into long term using visual images, games, or plain practice.
Games such as crosswords require short-term memory to solve problems. In the article, "This is Your Brain on Crosswords," Adrienne Raphel dives into how crosswords are brain teasers relating to memory. Raphel claims that the memories used in “crosswords are in-between short-term memories and long-term memories” as you have to retrieve old memories and encode new ones (Raphel, 2020). This middle stage was labeled by Baddley as the episodic buffer which combines visuospatial and verbal information. Crossword experts were found to have a strong episodic buffer. This would make sense as visuospatial cues are used to form a word along with verbally spelling out the word helps restore and store memories. This indirectly shows the large capacity that the short-term memory holds as it uses verbal and visuospatial information to simultaneously store information.
While visuospatial information is useful for short-term memory, visual images can also affect the visual short-term memory capacity. In the article, “Does Visual Short-Term Memory have a High-Capacity Stage?,” Matsukura et al. explores how different types of visual stimuli affect the visual short-term memory (VSTM). While Raphel observed how real written crosswords affected short-term memory, Matsukura approached this topic with digital visual cues. This eliminates the verbal factors to focus on only the VSTM. Matsukura also noted that attention can further encode memories and decay can occur with distractions. There was a controlled environment in which orientation and color were manipulated to have more accurate results. Matsukura found that more valid cues were encoded as they had the most attention by the participants . This can also explain the episodic buffer in Raphel’s study as more attention is noted to words that involve more retrieval or visuospatial observation. Matsukura’s experiment also found that practice helped perceptual features encode better as well.
Practice is a large part in encoding short-term memories as it requires understanding and attention towards information or objects. In the article, “The development of retro-cue benefits with extensive practice: Implications for capacity estimation and attentional states in visual working memory, ” Zerr et al. used retro-cues to help aid recall in multiple memories and distribute resources within the same type of memory. Practice was also a large focus of this study as it is a technique used to provide better access to a larger memory storage. Practice was also predicted to lead to better retrieval of encoded memories. They showed the participants retro-cues multiple times and asked them to record if the item was the same or different. After many trials, the results showed that retro-cues are not the most beneficial way to test redistributing objects and drawing attention to the prioritized object. They also predicted that the visual working memory has a larger set capacity than the short-term memory as there is more organization and prioritizing of information. As practice was a main focus in this experiment, there were 500 trials run before collecting data to find a more conclusive result. While retro-cues work with the visual working memory, there were not significant results to prove that the cues accessed high-capacity storage. Overall, practice was the biggest indicator of encoding information efficiently.
In conclusion, all these articles emphasize different ways short-term memory can encode information. Raphael talked about how episodic buffering in crossword games allowed better encoding in short-term memory. Matsukura talked about valid cues that showed attention retention creating better encoding. Zerr et al. talked about how practice was beneficial for any retro-cues to be encoded in the visual working memory. All of these articles involved significant attention in order to complete the task which is why they all showed encoding into the short-term memory. Matsukura and Zerr et al.’s studies showed a theme about how the VSTM’s limited capacity creates the need for organization of important information to retrieve or encode. This organization is done by the working memory (Zerr et al., 2021). While practice was emphasized in Zerr et al.’s study, there was an overlapping concept about how practice creates a better technique for memorizing. This is evident in how crossword experts showed a high episodic buffer and many trails were done to find valid cues as the best encoded cue. Along with practice, standard visual set-ups such as crossword puzzles or objects in a certain color or orientation help encode items as there is more attention towards it. All in all, practice and attention towards visual images and games helps better encode information into short-term memory which leads to long-term memory with further repetition and retrieval.
Works Cited:
Matsukura, M., & Hollingworth, A. (2011). Does visual short-term memory have a high-capacity stage? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(6), 1098–1104. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-011-0153-2
Raphel, A. (2020, March 17). This Is Your Brain on Crosswords. Retrieved March 05, 2021, from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/this-is-your-brain-on-crosswords/
Zerr, P., Gayet, S., van den Esschert, F., Kappen, M., Olah, Z., & Van der Stigchel, S. (2021). The development of retro-cue benefits with extensive practice: Implications for capacity estimation and attentional states in visual working memory. Memory & cognition, 1–14. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01138-5
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