A language learners’ forum

Cainntear wrote:

zenmonkey wrote:Well. I'm going to disagree with Caintear's statement that Anki only works on LTM and not on working memory a lot of the initial exposure to items in cards is, unfortunately, all about short term loss.

There's a huge difference between short term memory and working memory, though, and there's now a school of thought that says there's no such thing as short-term memory -- what we used to call STM is said by some to just be weak traces in LTM.

Holding multiple cards in working memory is difficult, especially if they aren't just single-word cards, and it relies on them having a very short revision cycle.

I've never liked the simple dichotomy of STM/LTM (what I like/don't like doesn't really matter). I think that the term STM gets abused a lot in discussions (after all we are talking about a period that is supposed to last 15-18 sec.

Certainly there is research that suggests verbal, visual and spatial systems are different. I can easily hold several 4 digit number for several minutes but for the life of me I have a heck of a time learning the name of a single number in a foreign language ....

Surely that’s pretty much handled by schematic theory, though? When I’m holding (for example) a phone number in my head, there’s a whole jumble of patterns and associations in long term memory that I can feel are active. Some of them are obvious (the basic rules of phone number length and prefixes) some are slightly more abstract, but identifiable (eg subsequence of 4 numbers starting with 18 or 19 looking like years) and some are completely obscure, feeling quite a bit like when you meet someone and you think they remind you of someone, but you just can’t think who.

The brain does a hell of a lot with familiar data to ensure that it can be processed without putting a heavy load on limited working memory.

Cainntear wrote:The brain does a hell of a lot with familiar data to ensure that it can be processed without putting a heavy load on limited working memory.

It does. I'm personally not sufficient up to speed on how schematic theory links up with STM/LTM, if at all.