Alpha span: A measure of working memory.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the alpha span test, short lists of words are presented and the participant's task is to mentally reorder the words and give them back in correct alphabetical order. Alpha span is the longest list of words correctly recalled; the article also describes a scoring method in which credit is given for partially correct answers. Alpha span provides a quick and easily completed measure of verbal-numerical working memory (WM), and evidence is presented to show that it is also a valid and reliable measure. One purpose of the article is to present data on age-related differences in WM in participants 17 to 87 years of age. These data show that alpha span is highest in people in their 20s and then declines systematically from the 20s to the 80s. A 2nd purpose is to report data on the reliability of the alpha span measure and explore its relationships with other cognitive measures. The article concludes with some comments on the nature of WM as illustrated by alpha span; specifically, we suggest that WM reflects both domain-general executive functions and specific abilities in the domain tapped by the task in question. (PsycINFO Database Record
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".