Psychology & Neuroscience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for practitioners, researchers, and students in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Is there any reason why chunking the digit span test would not help, and what is the average score without chunking? By chunking I mean any rehearsal besides saying the numbers one time as they appear.
I asked a similar question already:
Just intrigued why chunking might not work as well (and it's trivial that it won't always work as well), or not at all.
As far as I know the effectiveness of chunking depends on (1) test speed and (2) amount of practice.
At low speed simple techniquest benefit almost everyone a little, even with virtually no practice. Quoting from Dempster and Zinkgraf
Recently, in fact, evidence has been found that questions the validity of the assumption that chunking plays a role in digit-span variance. In one experiment, Lyon (1977) presented 12-item digit sequences to adult subjects for whom conventional digit-span estimates were available, and instructed them to think of each successive group of three digits as a three-digit number. The important result was that subjects with high spans (average = 8.3) benefited just as much from the chunking instructions as those with low spans (average = 6.1). Thus, prompting all subjects to impose a common structure on the lists did not produce the convergence of the two groups that would be expected if chunking was the source of differences between subjects in the high- and low-span groups.
On the other hand
However, it does seem plausible that the temporal characteristics of the digit-span task (rapid presentation rate and single trial) simply allow little opportunity for chunking, unless the individual is exceptionally adept at creating chunks (Hunt & Love, 1972, pp. 248-250), or has received an extended period of practice (Ericsson, Chase, & Faloon, 1980; Gates & Taylor, 1925; Martin & Fernberger, 1929). For such an individual, chunking can be a highly successful strategy.
The "extended practice" mentioned there involves associative techniques not merely chunking.
