Psychological Development and Education ›› 2014, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (4): 420-426.

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The Effects of Working Memory Load and Automatic Retrieval on Elementary School Students Mental Addition Strategy Execution

DAI Man, LIU Ru-de, DI Miao-ci, MA Xue-ying, XU Le   

  1. School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875
  • Online:2014-07-15 Published:2014-07-15

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Abstract: Previous research has shown that the strategy execution of mental arithmetic was affected by two main factors: working memory and automatic retrieval, but so far few researchers have studied the interactive effects of them. Based on a sample of 43 elementary school students (18 boys and 25 girls), the present study used preset addition tasks to require participants to perform different arithmetic strategies, and then to explore the effects of working memory load and automatic retrieval on the strategy execution of complex addition. Both of the two independent variables had two levels, for which working memory load was divided into partial decomposition and full decomposition, and automatic retrieval was divided into one-carry and two-carry, so resulted in a 2(working memory load)×2(automatic retrieval) within subjects experiment. Results were as follows: (1) working memory load had a significant influence on strategy execution, the less the load of working memory, the better the results of strategy execution; (2) the effect of automatic retrieval on strategy execution was also significant, the higher the degree of automatic retrieval, the better the outcome of strategy execution; (3) the interaction between working memory load and automatic retrieval reached significant, as in the case of high degree of automatic retrieval, the discretion of the working memory load on the results of strategy execution was not different; while in the case of low degree of automatic retrieval, students' performance with little working memory load was better than with large working memory load.

Key words: working memory load, automatic retrieval, mental addition strategy, elementary school students

CLC Number: 

  • G442

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