Memory skills mediating superior memory in a world-class memorist

Abstract

Laboratory studies have investigated how individuals with normal memory spans attained digit spans over 80 digits after hundreds of hours of practice. Experimental analyses of their memory skills suggested that their attained memory spans were constrained by the encoding time, for the time needed will increase if the length of digit sequences to be memorised becomes longer. These constraints seemed to be violated by a world-class memorist, Feng Wang (FW), who won the World Memory Championship by recalling 300 digits presented at 1 digit/s. In several studies we examined FW's memory skills underlying his exceptional performance. First FW reproduced his superior memory span of 200 digits under laboratory condition, and we obtained his retrospective reports describing his encoding/retrieval processes (Experiment 1). Further experiments used self-paced memorisation to identify temporal characteristics of encoding of digits in 4-digit clusters (Experiment 2), and explored memory encoding at presentation speeds much faster than 1 digit/s (Experiment 3). FW's superiority over previous digit span experts is explained by his acquisition of well-known mnemonic techniques and his training that focused on rapid memorisation. His memory performance supports the feasibility of acquiring memory skills for improved working memory based on storage in long-term memory.

Integrating Theories of Working Memory

“…This demonstrates that procedural knowledge about what it means to recall in serial order also contributes to memory span. Other evidence comes from studies demonstrating that within a domain of expertise, substantially more information can be retained than is widely assumed to be within the capacity of WM (Ericsson, 2014;Ericsson et al, 2017; see chapter by Hambrick, Burgoyne, and Araújo, 2020). Some of the best known findings have arisen from studies of expert chess players who can retain details of multiple chess positions based on storage in LTM (e.g.…”

Human cognition: Common principles and individual variation.

“…For example, the sequence 984 could be remembered as 9.84 s, or a record time for running 100 m. He became very proficient at translating number sequences into running times, etc., allowing him, after several weeks of intensive training, eventually to dramatically increase his memory span for digits, but this was specific to digits. More recently, and even more dramatically, Ericsson et al (2017) have reported a range of memory strategies used by world memory champion Feng Wang who achieved recall of 300 random digits presented at one per second.…”

Episodic and associative memory from spatial scaffolds in the hippocampus

“…An intriguing memory technique known for millennia, the memory palace or method of loci [127][128][129][130] , is widely exploited by memory athletes in mnemonic competitions 131,132 . Given a list of typically non-spatial items to memorize, such as a sequence of playing cards, memory athletes imagine walking along a specific path through a familiar and richly remembered space, such as one's childhood home or school, Fig.…”