Working memory
The short-term memory system that temporarily stores and actively processes information — as opposed to long-term memory, which stores information durably. Defined by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, “Working Memory” (1974, in The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 8).
Capacity and limits
Per The Gamer’s Brain (book) (Chapter 4): working memory is severely limited — an adult can hold roughly three to four items simultaneously, and this drops further under stress or anxiety, and is lower still in children. Hodent’s example: mentally adding 876 + 758 requires holding the numbers in working memory while also processing them — a task that quickly exceeds capacity without external aids (like writing the numbers down).
Working memory is composed of subsystems with distinct roles — Hodent specifically invokes the phonological loop (Chapter 5) for language-processing tasks, using the example of trying to listen to two conversations at a party simultaneously: because both draw on the same phonological-loop resource, you can’t process them at once and instead “flip-flop” your focus between them (a case of divided attention / multitasking, distinct from the single-target “spotlight” of Selective attention).
Working memory and cognitive load
Working memory capacity is the resource that Cognitive load theory is about managing: the more demanding a task is on working memory (because it’s complex or unfamiliar), the more attentional resources it consumes, and the more likely a distraction is to disrupt performance or a new mechanic is to fail to stick. Hodent ties this directly to onboarding: cognitive overload during a tutorial doesn’t just feel unpleasant to a player — it can actively prevent the important mechanic from being learned at all.
Why it matters for games
Because working memory is the bottleneck through which new mechanics, controls, and objectives have to pass before they can be learned, Hodent treats it as a hard design constraint: don’t display more information at once than working memory can hold, prioritize which signals matter most when many are competing (e.g., during combat with multiple enemies and effects on screen), and don’t expect players to hold long chains of instructions in mind without external reminders. This directly underlies her account of the Forgetting curve — what working memory fails to consolidate into long-term memory is what gets forgotten.
Related
- Cognitive load — the applied design concept built directly on working memory’s limited capacity
- Forgetting curve — what happens after working memory content fails to consolidate into long-term memory
- Selective attention — the attentional resource that determines what working memory receives in the first place