WMM

• How many components of the WMM are there?

  4
• What are the 4 components of the WMM?

  • Central executive
  • Phonological loop
  • Episodic buffer
  • Visuo-spatial sketchpad
• What is the central executive?

  • Head of model -> controls attention, receives sensory info + filters it before passing to slave systems
  • Limited capacity (4 items)
  • Works on 1 piece of info at a time
  • Can easily switch attention between inputs
  • Modality-free coding
• What is the phonological loop?

  • Slave system
  • Processes auditory information
  • Primary acoustic/phonological store
  • 'Inner ear'
  • Processes speech perception + holds words in order they were heard
  • Articulatory rehearsal component
  • 'Inner voice'
  • Holds info via subvocal repetition
  • Limited capacity (2s worth of auditory info)
• What is the episodic buffer?

  • Slave system
  • General store to hold + integrate info from other systems
  • Limited capacity
  • Modality-free coding
• What is the visuo-spatial sketchpad?


  • Processes visually + spatially coded info
  • 'Inner eye'
  • Visual cache
  • Passive store of form + colour
  • Inner scribe
  • Active store holding relationships + movement between objects in 3D space
  • Active rehearsal component of visual info