INSTRUCTOR: So you ended the last video with the backward alphabet activity to illustrate how limited cognitive resources are taxed by the demands of both holding and manipulating information. Think about how you managed that activity. You probably said the alphabet forward, remembered a small chunk of letters, and then said that chunk backward. You had to divide your resources between holding chunks of letters and manipulating. And each time you did the backward manipulation, you lost some portion of the chunk that came before. You probably have a sense of how demanding that task was.

People can only manage so much mental work before they begin to feel like this man (a man laying flat on the floor with paperwork spread out everywhere). And this leads us to the fourth and final characteristic of working memory that we want to consider. That characteristic pertains to the idea that there is a continuum that reflects how demanding any mental task is. In other words, tasks range from placing high or low demand on cognitive resources.

Demand refers to how much mental effort is expended on a task. A high-demand task is highly effortful; a low-demand task requires no cognitive effort.

We can express that idea using a continuum of effort. One end of the continuum is anchored by fully effortful. These tasks require 100% of cognitive resources, and may even overwhelm those resources. These tasks make us feel like this young man (showing on the left-hand side). The other end is anchored by a fully automatic process. This is one that we carry out without using any cognitive resources. Here, for example, our young man is able to complete the problem in front of him with ease.

To understand what a fully automatic process is, remember that working memory is the system that contains all of the information about which you are currently aware. Holding this information, or being aware of it, requires cognitive resources. To qualify as fully automatic, a process must be one that you can carry out without thinking about it at all, without holding that information in working memory.

Given this criterion, you should recognize that few cognitive activities are actually fully automatic. Examples of ones that might be for you include activities like reading a word or answering the question, "What is 2 plus 2?".

Most of what we do though, actually falls somewhere in the middle of this continuum. Somewhere where we can do the work but we have to use some of our cognitive resources. An important thing to realize about this continuum is that whenever we learn something new, it starts off toward the fully effortful end of the continuum. As we practice, it moves toward the fully automatic end.

Now, understand that this is a relative difference. Not everything new is so demanding that it starts out fully effortful. And not everything you practice can ever be moved to fully automatic. Despite this, it is always the case that everything you learn starts out as more demanding than it ends up after you have practiced it. This is important to keep in mind when teaching. We always have to be sensitive to the idea that a task we are teaching is more demanding for our learners than it is for us.