Working Memory Model

• The WMM is made up of four components

  The central executive, the phonological loop, the visuo spatial sketchpad and the episodic buffer
• Central Executive

  Controls our attention and receives information from our senses which it then filters based on importance before passing it to our two slave systems. It has a limited capacity and can only work on one type of information at a time, but can quickly switch to another.
• Phonological loop

  An acoustic store that processes auditory information received from the central executive. It has a limited capacity of around 2 seconds worth of what you can say, and is further divided into two sections.
• What is the phonological loop divided into

  The phonological store and the articulatory process
• The phonological store

  The "inner ear" that holds onto words heard recently
• Articulatory process

  Inner voice that holds information via maintenance rehearsal.
• Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad

  Processes visually and spatially coded information received from the central executive, often referred to as an "inner eye". It is further divided into two sections and has a limited capacity of 3-4 objects.
• What is the visuo-spatial sketchpad divided into

  The visual cache and inner scribe
• Visual Cache

  A passive store for shape, form and colour
• Inner scribe


  Active store holding the spatial relationships for objects in a 3D space
• Episodic Buffer

  Added in 2000 as a general store to correct problems risen from the limited capacity of the two slave systems, where information is integrated and held from the VSS, PL, LTM and CE.
• AO3 of WMM

  • Research support comes from Baddeley and dual task techniques.
  • He gave participants a visual task, where they had to track a moving light, and one of two others.
  • One was to describe the angles on the letter F, and the other was a verbal task.
  • Participants found the visual task much harder to complete than the verbal one, which supports the model as it provides evidence for the PL and VSS being two separate systems.
• AO3 of the WMM

  • evidence to support comes from the case study of KF, who suffered brain damage to his short term memory after an accident
  • They found that KF struggled to recall digits when they were read out loud to him, but his recall improved when he read the digits himself.
  • This suggests that the PL and VSS exist as two separate processes
  • However case studies are not generalisable to a wider population as they only look at one individuals experience which may impact the validity of this study as supporting evidence
• AO3 of WMM

  • there is a lack of clarity over the central executive, and it has been critisised for being too vague. Baddeley himself says that the CE is the most important yet least understood part of the model
  • this suggests the model hasn't been fully explained which questions it's validity when trying to explain memory
• AO3 of WMM

  • It is impossible to directly observe the processes of memory that models like the WMM describe
  • therefore, inferences are made and there is no empirical evidence to back up these claims, meaning they may not be 100% accurate