Anna is taller than Beth. Beth is taller than Carla. Who is the shortest?
Two sentences, three people, one ordering. Almost everyone gets this right, and that is exactly what makes it a clean measurement rather than a difficult question.
Working memory, doing its actual job
Carla is the shortest. Anna is above Beth, Beth is above Carla, so the order runs Anna, Beth, Carla and the bottom of that list is Carla.
This is a transitive inference, and it is the cleanest measurement of working memory on the whole test. Nothing here is difficult. What the question asks is whether you can hold two relationships in mind simultaneously and combine them into one ordering.
Add two more people and the same question becomes genuinely hard for most adults, not because the logic changed but because the workspace filled up. That is the capacity limit doing its work in plain view.
How to improve working memory
There is a large industry built on the promise of expanding this capacity directly, and the evidence behind it is considerably thinner than the marketing suggests.
The honest answer is that raising raw capacity is hard and the evidence for training programs that claim to do it is weak. What works well is reducing how much capacity a task needs in the first place.
Chunking is the main tool. Ten separate digits will not fit; three chunks will. An ordering you have written on paper takes no capacity at all. Experts in any field appear to have huge memories mostly because their knowledge is packed into larger units.
- Externalize anything you do not have to hold in your head
- Group items into meaningful chunks instead of tracking them singly
- Convert relationships into a picture or a line as soon as there are three
- Build deeper knowledge in one area, which makes its chunks bigger
Chunking, the memory palace and elaborative encoding all attack the same capacity limit from different angles. We break down all nine of them in our guide to Técnicas de memorização que realmente funcionam, which opens in a new tab.
From here the questions get harder. Question six is a number series with a rule that does not announce itself.