The mental area, often compared to a carpenter's workbench, where individuals manipulate and combine information when making decisions or understand something they are reading, is called:

The mental area described above is the working memory.

It is a cognitive system which receives the information collected by a person's senses and manipulates it for processing or for elaborating responses in the short run. Is crucial for reasoning and for the decision making processes that shape attitudes and behaviour.

The working memory is the intermediate step between the short term memory, where the information collected is immediately available for a short time not processed, and the long-term memory (LTM), where information is stored definitely.