Information Processing - Working Memory

Many different skills are involved, including:

• Speed of thinking is the rate at which information can be taken in processed, and then acted upon – ‘how fast the cogs turn.’

• Capacity of thinking is the amount of information that can be taken in during any one sitting – whether you’re ‘firing on all cylinders’ or just one cylinder.

• Abstracting is the ability to think in an abstract, non-concrete way: to think of something without it being placed in front of you and make links between different things or events.

• Organization skills are many ways the brain organizes information, including matching, discriminating, sequencing, grouping, categorizing, and ordering.

Conscious vs. Automatic Processing

As we become familiar with a task, it becomes automatic (e.g., driving). While we learn a new task, we often have to think about it consciously, but as we develop skill at the task, we seem to carry it out automatically. This “automatization” frees up our attention capacity to focus it on other novel tasks and situations. Once we become proficient at driving a car, we can drive and listen to the radio or have a conversation simultaneously. If this movement from conscious to automatic did not happen, we would quickly become overloaded by the demands of life. Following brain injury, it seems that many of those skills that functioned on an automatic level now operate on a conscious level – more slowly and with more effort. So, after brain injury, many people reach a point of information overload much quicker.