Synonyms
Historical Background
The term digit span encompasses several important constructs and names of tests designed to measure these constructs. First and foremost digit span, along with reaction time, may be viewed as one of the two original paradigms used by experimental psychologists to investigate cognition. The origins of digit span as a psychological construct date from the work Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). Leibniz suggested that individuals have a finite capacity to prospectively process or hold in mind the information from the environment. He termed this capacity the span of apperception. (Much of the historical information reviewed in this essay is drawn from JTE Richardson’s paper: Measurements of short-term memory: A historical review. Cortex, 43, 635–650, 2007.)
In the nineteenth century, Herman Ebbinghaus (1850–1909; 1885/1964 cited in Richardson, 2007) was the first cognitive scientist to show how span could be used as an...
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Wambach, D., Lamar, M., Swenson, R., Penney, D.L., Kaplan, E., Libon, D.J. (2011). Digit Span. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79948-3_1288
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