The Effects Of Stress On Working Memory

Memory is a process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information. It is the total sum of who we are and what we know. It is also absolutely crucial in everything we do and affects how well we do it. A large variety of studies have already been conducted on memory and show that there are different types of memory. In their study, Luo and Craik (2008) looked at the effects of age on memory and found that aging contributes to increasing difficulty to complete complex memory tasks. There’s a decline in certain types of memory that is age-related and attributed to the slowing of processing speed, reduction in attentional resources, inefficient inhibition, and loss of cognitive control (Luo & Craik, 2008). One specific type of memory is working …show more content…
There is a connection between working memory and performance on cognitive tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning (Engle, 2002). The proposed study can be significant not only to numerous different disciplines but also for individuals across the different lifespans: children who are in a stage prime for learning, adolescents who are going through a period of transitions and turmoil, adults who are dependent on job performance, and seniors for whom age is already an unavoidable factor for diminished memory …show more content…
It will address the following question: does stress affect the performance of working memory? The hypothesis is that if an individual’s stress level is increased, then the individual’s working memory performance will decrease. The research design for the proposed study is the experimental method. This type of method would allow the independent variable, which is stress level, to be manipulated to see if it produces a change in the dependent variable, which is working memory performance. This type of design is best for addressing the research question and accomplishing the objective of the study because it allows for the control of other variables thereby increasing the likelihood that any change within the dependent variable is a result of the independent variable. The study would consist of 200 participants, selected via random sampling. The participants would be males and females, ages 12-65, from various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. All participants would be given a device that measure heart rate and asked to complete a pretest to set the baseline against which future performance would be measured. The study would use a test comprised of four working memory tasks: sentence-spa, operation-span, spatial short-term memory, and memory updating. This particular sequence of tasks was chosen based on work on measures of working