The Box Metaphor for Working Memory

[cover image by stocksnap on Pixabay]

by Cindy Nebel

How many boxes can you hold?

Late last year, I went to a talk by Dr. Sarah Oberle where she posed this question and I have been using a modified version of this metaphor ever since.

It is clearly a trick question. The answer, like so many things in our complex world of education is, of course, it depends. It depends on several factors that match up quite nicely with the same questions of what we can hold in working memory. Below I’ll walk through a few of these and hopefully it will give you a better way of thinking about working memory as well.

How strong are you?

Some of us simply can hold more boxes than others due to individual differences. I’m not a terribly strong person so if you hand me heavy boxes, I’m not going to be very successful. The same is true for working memory. There are individual differences in that some people naturally have a higher working memory capacity than others. This will allow them to hold onto more information at any given time to be able to reason and problem solve at a higher level.

What’s in the boxes and how big are they?

These two questions are the important ones and ones that we have a little more control over as educators. I want you to imagine for me that you are sitting in a neuroanatomy lecture. Here’s what you overhear:

“In the coronal section, note how the decussating corticospinal fibers traverse the ventral medulla just anterior to the rapidly diverging inferior olivary nuclei before synapsing onto interneurons that modulate somatotopically organized motor efferents projecting through the lateral funiculus.” - credit to chatGPT

Unless you are an expert in neuroanatomy, I just tossed you 30 ring boxes to hold. That is, you just received many disparate pieces of information. Because you know very little about neuroanatomy, trying to remember this is going to involve memorizing individual pieces of information, single words with very little meaning.

Image created by author

This is one of the primary reasons why the prior knowledge of our students is so critical to understand in educational settings. Similar to the above, I have a colleague who prefers to explain things in sports metaphors. Let’s be clear: I am not an expert in sports… anything, let alone metaphors. I often walk away from a meeting wondering how I’m supposed to tighten the defense in my advising meetings. What?

Prior knowledge is about meeting students where they are, both in the language that we use as well as the concepts. If we build from the foundation that they walk in with, they will be much more likely to understand us.

Let’s go back to those neuro ring boxes for a moment. At this point, you’re trying to hold onto “coronal”, “olivary”, “medulla”. You are a novice. (No offense to the people who understood that passage perfectly; bear with me.) As a novice in this area, any incoming information is processed in these small bits.

If you were a relative expert in neuroanatomy, you might process this differently. You would see a clear story in that passage. This is a relatively straightforward corticospinal pathway where much of the information is predictable and extra. For example, “somatotopically organized” means that the neurons are mapped according to body parts. Lucky for me: I already knew that motor neurons were mapped that way. I pretty much skipped over that when reading the passage because it wasn’t new information and I didn’t need to remember it to understand motor neurons.

image created by author

In a way, I have a few of those ring boxes stored in a shoe box for motor neurons. While I am no neuroanatomy expert, I do have an organizational scheme for some of this information. So when I see motor neuron, I’ve already chunked a bunch of extra information and understanding with that one concept.

Let’s take a different example, that probably makes more sense to people. What if we were talking about baseball? Here, I’m the novice…

"On the sharply hit 6–4 bouncer, observe how the shortstop initiates the double-play sequence by executing a momentum-efficient, closed-hip gather before transferring through a high-spin, wrist-pronated pivot to the second baseman, who—already positioned in a shallow, anti-handoff depth aligned with probabilistic spray charts—finishes the turn with a sub-0.4-second pop-release optimized for arm-slot continuity and downstream kinetic-chain stability to complete the 6–4–3 twin killing.” - chatGPT

To be clear, this is nonsense to me. I read that first line and have to stop at “double-play” and ask:

Two runs?

Two hits?

Two bases?

Two outs?

That’s a ring box that I’m going to have to memorize.

As educators, we are helping students to organize their knowledge not just so that they can regurgitate it on a test but because organized knowledge changes the way that we perceive the world. We are able to hold onto more so that we can reason and problem-solve with more information at our fingertips.

Well-organized knowledge also fundamentally changes the way that we process the world. A chess master sees the next move instead of scattered pieces, my husband sees safety violations when he walks into a warehouse, I see possible test anxiety, sleep patterns, and study habits when a student chats with me about how they’re doing.

But it is critical that we recognize where students are so that we are not forcing them to memorize those isolated bits of information. With careful scaffolding students can build. This is related to the concept of expertise reversal: the idea that novices need someone to help them make sense of things. They learn best when they are given that foundational knowledge, when they are explicitly taught. Experts, with the foundation laid, expand their knowledge best when they are given the opportunity to reason and problem solve. They learn best with more inquiry-related methods of teaching.

Final note

I’ve been throwing around the words expert and novice, which turn out to be relatively jargon-heavy words. What do they actually mean? In this context, it’s all relative. I am a relative novice when it comes to Roblox. My son is a relative expert. I need him to explain to me what we’re doing and how to play a game (don’t worry, we play together and parental settings are very much on). He gets frustrated by that because he wants to get in there and explore. As educators, our job is to take our students from that state of relative novice to relative expert, building on areas where they already have organized knowledge.

This is hard work. This is the hard work of education. But if we do this well, we have the opportunity to create more equitable classrooms where we don’t leave some of our students behind because we were tossing them ring boxes while the rest of the class was sitting happily with their shoe boxes.

Too far?