Rania Qais

The school of Psychological Sciences , Tel Aviv University

PI: Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg

Balancing Working Memory and Perception in Learning Environments

Project description

Effective learning requires a delicate balance between working memory (WM) retention and perceptual access. In a classroom setting, students must often sustain information in WM while gathering new sensory input from their environment. Optimizing the balance between memory retention and perceptual access is essential for maximizing learning efficiency.

Traditional teaching methods often place excessive cognitive demands on students by taxing both WM and sensory processing mechanisms simultaneously, leading to inefficient information retention and cognitive overload. This issue is particularly pronounced in tasks that require memorizing equations, comparing complex visual information, or copying text from a board. In these situations, students may default to heavy WM reliance, failing to take advantage of perceptual strategies like frequent eye movements to re-access information. Understanding how learners naturally balance memory and perception under varying cognitive loads and task designs is key to improving instructional methods and educational materials.

My study aims to investigate the interaction between WM utilization and sensory perception, with a focus on visual processing. Using eye-tracking, I will examine how learners allocate WM resources versus visual input and apply these insights to real-world classroom tasks, particularly copying from a board. The findings will inform cognitive load management strategies in educational design, helping develop more effective learning methods that optimize memory and perceptual processing.