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Information Processing Theory

Theory · All theories
Evidence · 115 claims (59 for, 55 mixed, 1 against) · 73 studies (27 causal, 24 associational, 13 review, 4 quant-synthesis, 4 theoretical, 1 design), q1–q4 · 15 of 73 report an effect size · 112 claims rest on one study

Description

Information Processing Theory treats learning as the movement and transformation of information through attention, working memory, encoding, storage, and retrieval. In broad terms, the theory asks what learners notice, how much they can actively process at once, how they organize new information, and how it becomes retrievable later.

This theory family is especially useful for instructional design because it highlights bottlenecks: limited working-memory capacity, the need for organization, the role of prior knowledge in encoding, and the importance of retrieval and feedback. Many common design moves such as chunking, worked examples, sequencing, and review are partly justified in information-processing terms.

Attention is the entry point to the whole system, and it develops substantially across childhood and adolescence. Selective attention — filtering out irrelevant input to focus on what matters — improves sharply from around age 6 into adolescence; young children (ages 4–7) are markedly worse than teens or adults at filtering background noise specifically (Jones, Moore, & Amitay, 2015). Sustained attention grows roughly linearly with age in early-to-middle childhood (a rough rule of thumb: a 5-year-old sustains attention for about 5 minutes, gaining roughly a minute per year of age up to about 10, then plateauing around 10–20 minutes through the teen years and adulthood; Raichle, 1999). Divided attention (multitasking) also has a clear developmental trajectory — 3-to-4-year-olds perform on some divided-attention tasks at roughly the level of chimpanzees, 5-year-olds already surpass this, and capacity continues improving into adolescence (Hermann, Misch, Hernandez-Lloreda, & Tomasello, 2015) — but divided attention has real limits at any age: automaticity, task complexity, anxiety, and arousal all affect how much can genuinely be attended to at once, and the well-documented degradation of driving performance under simultaneous phone use (Strayer & Drews, 2007) illustrates that "multitasking" is often really rapid task-switching with a real performance cost, not true parallel processing.

Sensory memory is the system's entry point, holding roughly four items very briefly — visual (iconic) memory lasts roughly half a second, auditory (echoic) memory a few seconds longer (touch and smell/taste registers are much less understood) — and this duration does not appear to change developmentally from infancy onward (Siegler, 1998). Information sensory memory doesn't capture, or that isn't attended to and encoded further, is lost to decay. The classic Stroop effect (interference in naming the ink color of a color word when the word and ink color mismatch, e.g., the word "red" printed in blue ink) illustrates how automatic, overlearned processing (reading) can compete with attention for a different, task-relevant feature.

Working memory capacity itself develops with age: a 5-year-old can typically hold about 4 digits in mind, versus about 7 for an older teen or adult (a developmental gradient consistent with, though distinct from, Miller's cross-sectional 7±2 estimate below), with the growth partly explained by underlying myelination and synaptic pruning that increases processing speed and the ability to filter irrelevant information (Kail, McBride-Chang, Ferrer, Cho, & Shu, 2013). Without active rehearsal, working memory contents fade within roughly 20–30 seconds. Young children rely on simple rote rehearsal (repeating items) rather than clustering (grouping items meaningfully before rehearsing), and don't spontaneously adopt clustering until later in childhood; one longitudinal study found a majority of kindergarteners used no deliberate memory strategy at all (Schneider, Kron-Sperl, & Hunnerkopf, 2009). Working-memory limitations have direct instructional consequences: children with weaker working memory are more likely to struggle in math and reading and to lose track of multi-step directions (Alloway, 2009; Prebler, Krajewski, & Hasselhorn, 2013) — supportable through familiar vocabulary, shorter sentences, repeated instructions, and breaking tasks into smaller steps — and intensive training in chunking and related working-memory strategies has been shown to improve capacity in children who start out low (Alloway, Bibile, & Lau, 2013).

Encoding can be semantic (meaning-based), visual, or acoustic; Craik and Tulving's (1975) levels-of-processing finding is that semantic encoding — connecting new information to existing meaning — produces the strongest recall of the three, and the closely related self-reference effect (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977) shows recall improves further when learners relate new material to themselves specifically. This distinction underlies a practical contrast between maintenance rehearsal (simply repeating information to keep it active in working memory, which the evidence base treats as inefficient for long-term retention on its own) and elaboration (actively relating new information to existing knowledge), which is what actually moves information into long-term memory. Baddeley and Hitch's (1974) working-memory model offers a more differentiated alternative to Atkinson and Shiffrin's original single short-term store, splitting working memory into a central executive, a phonological loop (verbal/acoustic information), a visuospatial sketchpad (visual/spatial information), and an episodic buffer (integrating information across the other components) — a structure consistent with Miller's (1956) classic finding that working memory holds roughly 7±2 discrete chunks at once. Information in working memory that isn't consolidated is vulnerable to interference rather than simple decay.

Long-term memory is commonly split into explicit (declarative — semantic and episodic) and implicit (procedural) memory, with three modes of retrieval: recall, recognition, and relearning. A more fine-grained taxonomy adds imagery knowledge (mental representations of sensory experience), strategic knowledge (knowing which strategy to apply and when), and conceptual knowledge (organized relationships among ideas) alongside declarative, procedural, and episodic knowledge. Long-term forgetting is generally attributed to retrieval failure — losing the pathway to stored information — rather than true loss of the information itself, distinguishing it from the decay (sensory memory) and interference (working memory) mechanisms above.

Paivio's (1986) dual coding hypothesis — that information stored as both an image and a verbal label is better retained than information stored in only one format — is closely related and is covered in its own page, Dual Coding Theory.

Autobiographical memory — the ability to recall specific, personally-experienced past events — develops notably late. Most people show infantile amnesia: an inability to recall events from roughly the first three years of life, even though other kinds of learning (skills, some semantic knowledge) from that period persist. Coherent autobiographical memory develops gradually through early-to-middle childhood, aided by brain maturation, growing language ability, adult-child conversation about shared experiences, developing theory of mind, and an emerging sense of self as a continuous entity across time (Nelson & Fivush, 2004).

Two closely related but distinct topics — executive function (the self-regulatory processes that control and coordinate attention, memory, and behavior toward a goal) and metacognition (knowledge about, and regulation of, one's own thinking, including a learner's developing understanding of their own memory, or metamemory — and the production deficiency/utilization deficiency gap between having a strategy and actually benefiting from it) — are substantial enough to warrant their own pages; see Executive Function Development and Metacognition.

Criticisms

Information processing models are often criticized as overly linear and serial, in tension with evidence that some processing is parallel rather than strictly sequential. The model's rehearsal-dependent account of encoding struggles to explain single-exposure or emotionally charged (e.g., traumatic) memories, which can be strongly encoded without repetition. The computer-processing metaphor at the theory's core is imperfect and can obscure rather than illuminate certain phenomena, and the theory has little to say about the "hardware" changes underlying cognitive development itself (e.g., the emergence of abstract, formal-operational thought — see Stages of Cognitive Development), or about how environment, culture, and individual differences shape processing. It also generally does not account for the effect of emotional state on processing and recall.

Implications

Context

  • Relevant whenever instruction depends on attention, working memory, schema formation, or retrieval
  • Often used to justify sequencing, chunking, modeling, review, and explicit guidance
  • Particularly useful for novice learners who have not yet organized content into efficient schemas

Target Learners

  • Learners encountering unfamiliar or cognitively dense material
  • Learners who benefit from clear structure and manageable information flow
  • Novices who need help organizing steps, concepts, or representations

Target Learning Objectives

  • Building durable schema and conceptual organization
  • Reducing overload during initial learning
  • Improving transfer from working memory to long-term memory
  • Supporting later retrieval and application

Claims

The evidence by question

Examples

Educational Implications

Gain students' attention; ask students to recall prior relevant learning; point out important information; organize information from simple to complex; categorize related information; have students relate new information to what they already know; teach encoding techniques for memorizing lists (mnemonics, imagery); repeat and present information in multiple ways; use overlearning — practice continued beyond initial mastery — to build durable retention; make learning multi-modal by engaging more senses (e.g., physically acting out new vocabulary, video demonstrations); and avoid cognitive overload.

Key Sources

  • Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K. Spence & J. Spence (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 2, pp. 89-195). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-7421(08)60422-3
  • Baddeley, A. (1992). Working memory. Science, 255(5044), 556-559. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1736359
  • Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. (1974). Working memory. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 8, pp. 47–89). Academic Press.
  • Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. doi:10.1037/h0043158
  • Craik, F. I. M., & Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104(3), 268–294.
  • Spielman, R. M., Dumper, K., Jenkins, W., Lacombe, A., Lovett, M., & Perlmutter, M. (n.d.). Memory. In Psychology. OpenStax. Republished in R. West (Ed.), Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/lidtfoundations/memory
  • Jones, S. A., Moore, D. R., & Amitay, S. (2015). Development of auditory selective attention: Why children struggle to hear in noisy environments. Developmental Psychology, 51(3), 353-369.
  • Raichle, M. E. (1999). Modern phrenology: Maps of human cortical function. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 882, 107-118.
  • Hermann, E., Misch, A., Hernandez-Lloreda, V., & Tomasello, M. (2015). Uniquely human self-control begins at school age. Developmental Science, 18(6), 979-993.
  • Strayer, D. L., & Drews, F. A. (2007). Cell-phone-induced driver distraction. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(3), 128-131.
  • Siegler, R. S. (1998). Children's thinking (3rd ed.). Prentice Hall.
  • Kail, R. V., McBride-Chang, C., Ferrer, E., Cho, J.-R., & Shu, H. (2013). Cultural differences in the development of processing speed. Developmental Science, 16(4), 476-483.
  • Schneider, W., Kron-Sperl, V., & Hunnerkopf, M. (2009). The development of young children's memory strategies: Evidence from the Würzburg Longitudinal Memory Study. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6(1), 70-99.
  • Alloway, T. P. (2009). Understanding working memory: A classroom guide. Harcourt Assessment.
  • Prebler, A.-L., Krajewski, K., & Hasselhorn, M. (2013). Working memory status at school entry as a longitudinal predictor of symbolic arithmetic skills. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 31(3), 344-359.
  • Alloway, T. P., Bibile, V., & Lau, G. (2013). Computerized working memory training: Can it lead to gains in cognitive skills in students? Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 632-638.
  • Nelson, K., & Fivush, R. (2004). The emergence of autobiographical memory: A social cultural developmental theory. Psychological Review, 111(2), 486-511.
  • Miller, P. H. (2011). Theories of developmental psychology (5th ed.). Worth Publishers.
  • Paivio, A. (1990). Mental representations: A dual coding approach. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195066661.001.0001
  • O'Malley, M., Chamot, A. U., Stewer-Manzanares, G., Russo, R. P., & Kupper, L. (1985). Learning strategy applications with students of English as a second language. TESOL Quarterly, 19, 557-584.
  • Zhou, M., & Brown, D. (Eds.). (2015). Information processing theory. In Educational learning theories (2nd ed.). GALILEO Open Learning Materials.
  • Arduini-Van Hoose, N. (2020). Information processing theories. In Educational psychology. Retrieved from https://edpsych.pressbooks.sunycreate.cloud. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Page metadata
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type theory
title Information Processing Theory
description Information Processing Theory treats learning as the movement and transformation of information through attention, working memory, encoding, storage, and retrieval.
status review
canonical True
generated by claude/unspecified on 2026-08-29
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — baddeley-1992

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