How Visualising a Soroban in Your Mind Builds Working Memory

By Dr. Priya Venkatraman, Head of Pedagogy, AnzanPro

Every parent has heard the phrase "working memory" — usually when a teacher explains why a bright child keeps forgetting their homework or losing track mid-problem. But working memory is far more than an administrative nuisance. It is, arguably, the single most important cognitive capacity for academic learning — and it is one that can be systematically trained.

The soroban — the Japanese abacus — turns out to be one of the most effective tools we have for building it.

What Is Working Memory, Really?

Working memory is not the same as short-term memory, though the terms are often confused. Short-term memory is passive: it holds information briefly. Working memory is active: it holds information and manipulates it simultaneously.

The most influential model of working memory, proposed by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974 and refined over subsequent decades, describes three core components:

• The phonological loop: holds verbal and auditory information (the "inner voice")
• The visuospatial sketchpad: holds and manipulates visual and spatial information (the "inner eye")
• The central executive: coordinates attention and manages both systems

A fourth component, the episodic buffer, was added in 2000 to account for how working memory integrates information across modalities and connects to long-term memory.

What makes abacus training so neurologically interesting is its direct, intensive engagement with the visuospatial sketchpad — the component that holds mental images.

Most school-based arithmetic practice loads the phonological loop: children count aloud, recite multiplication tables, rehearse number sequences verbally. The visuospatial sketchpad — which research consistently shows is equally important for mathematical reasoning — is largely left to develop incidentally.

Abacus training changes that deliberately.

The Soroban as a Mental Image Object

When a child first encounters a soroban, it is a physical object: a wooden frame with rods and beads that move with tactile satisfaction. In this stage, the learning is concrete and sensorimotor. The child maps numbers to configurations, develops finger coordination, and builds a physical intuition for place value.

But this is only the beginning of what the soroban teaches.

With consistent, structured practice, something remarkable happens: the physical tool begins to fade into the background. The child no longer needs to look at it — the columns, the beads, the earth beads below and heaven bead above, all of it assembles inside the mind. Psychologists call this the internalisation of a cognitive tool.

This internalised soroban is what researchers describe as a mental image object — a stable, precise, manipulable visual representation held in the visuospatial sketchpad. Unlike a blurry mental impression, the mental soroban in an experienced practitioner is exact: they can "see" beads move, "read" totals, and perform arithmetic on numbers they cannot see by interacting with this vivid inner image.

Frank & Barner (2012) confirmed experimentally that this is genuinely a visuospatial object, not a verbal one. When expert abacus users were subjected to dual-task interference targeting their visuospatial working memory, their arithmetic performance degraded sharply. Verbal interference left it untouched.

The Progression: Physical → Mental → Anzan

The journey from soroban to Anzan follows a well-documented developmental arc that parallels how working memory itself develops:

Stage 1: Concrete Manipulation (Levels 1–3)

The child works with a physical soroban. The goal is accuracy and the building of number-bead mappings. Working memory load is relatively low because the tool externalises the storage.

Stage 2: Parallel Processing (Levels 4–6)

The child begins practising with eyes partly closed or while performing mental exercises alongside physical manipulation. The internal representation begins to form. Working memory is increasingly engaged as the child holds the "state" of the abacus partly in their mind.

Stage 3: Mental Abacus (Levels 7–9)

The physical soroban is removed from calculations. The child performs arithmetic entirely on their mental image. Visuospatial working memory is now the primary cognitive workspace. This is the stage where the most dramatic cognitive development occurs.

Stage 4: Anzan (Level 10 and Beyond)

Full mental calculation at speed. Flash anzan — processing numbers displayed for fractions of a second and summing them mentally — represents the pinnacle of visuospatial working memory training. Expert practitioners can sum 15 three-digit numbers flashed at 0.2 seconds each.

What Research Says About Working Memory Gains

The evidence is consistent and compelling. A meta-analysis by Barner et al. (2016), examining studies across Taiwan, India, Japan, and China, found that abacus-trained children scored significantly higher on visuospatial working memory tasks compared to controls matched for age, IQ, and socioeconomic background.

Ku et al. (2019) found that 12 weeks of flash anzan training produced measurable increases in Corsi block span — a standard visuospatial working memory assessment — in children aged 7 to 12. The effect sizes were comparable to those seen in dedicated working memory training programmes that target working memory directly.

Perhaps most strikingly, a study by Stigler (1984) — one of the earliest systematic investigations of mental abacus — found that expert users could perform addition with working memory loads far exceeding what standard cognitive models predicted as possible. The soroban's columnar, positional structure turns out to be a highly efficient encoding for numbers: it compresses numerical information into a spatial configuration that takes up less visuospatial working memory capacity than the raw numbers would.

Transfer to Reading, Science, and Language Learning

If abacus training only improved arithmetic, it would be a worthy skill. But the working memory gains transfer broadly — and this is where things get genuinely exciting.

Reading comprehension depends heavily on holding earlier parts of a sentence in working memory while processing later parts. Studies consistently show that children with higher visuospatial working memory span have better reading comprehension, even controlling for phonological awareness (Swanson & Siegel, 2001).

Science problem-solving — particularly physics, chemistry, and biology — frequently requires holding mental models of systems while reasoning about changes to them. This is a visuospatial working memory task at its core.

Language learning benefits from the enhanced executive function that abacus training develops: the ability to hold a sentence frame in mind while slotting in new vocabulary, or to track grammatical rules while producing language in real time.

At AnzanPro, we regularly hear from parents whose children showed unexpected improvements in subjects beyond maths after starting the programme — better essay organisation, stronger science test performance, improved reading fluency. This isn't coincidence. It's working memory transfer.

Exercises That Develop Visuospatial Working Memory

Whether or not your child is enrolled in an abacus programme, there are exercises that directly develop the visuospatial sketchpad:

With a Soroban

• Timed addition and subtraction drills — not for speed, but for accuracy under mild time pressure, which forces the working memory to maintain precision
• Flash anzan practice — starting with 2-digit numbers displayed for 1 second, gradually reducing display time
• Eyes-closed calculation — attempting familiar problem sets with eyes closed to force the mental representation

Without a Soroban

• Mental rotation exercises: visualising a 3D shape and rotating it in the mind's eye (many free apps exist for this)
• Spatial span tasks: the Corsi block sequence task trains visuospatial working memory directly
• Block puzzles and tangrams: require holding a spatial goal in mind while manipulating pieces

General Practice Principles

• 10–15 minutes daily outperforms 60-minute weekly sessions — working memory, like physical fitness, responds to regular load, not occasional intensity
• Graduated difficulty matters: the cognitive gains come from working at the edge of current capacity, not in the comfort zone
• Reduce verbal interference: try performing visuospatial tasks in silence rather than talking through them, to load the visuospatial system specifically

The Daily Practice Principle

One of the most common questions parents ask is: how often should my child practise? The research here is clear, and the answer is counterintuitive.

Daily sessions of 10–15 minutes are significantly more effective than longer but less frequent sessions. This is consistent with what we know about distributed practice in the cognitive science literature: spacing learning over time — rather than massing it — produces stronger, more durable memory traces.

For working memory specifically, regular engagement also appears to be important for maintenance. Studies of working memory training programmes show that gains diminish without continued practice, similar to how physical fitness declines without exercise. Abacus training provides a natural, enjoyable vehicle for this ongoing engagement — children who love their abacus practice naturally maintain the cognitive exercise their brains need.

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To learn more about AnzanPro's structured approach to soroban and Anzan training — and how our curriculum is designed around exactly these cognitive science principles — visit anzanpro.com and book your child's free introductory session.