Working memory model

• What is the working memory model?

  Only looks a short term memory, and considers it to be more complex than the multistore model suggests. This model was proposed by Baddeley and Hitch.
• What is the central executive?

  • Monitors and controls activity
  • Modality free (can code in any way)
  • Of limited capacity
  • Can monitor incoming data from the senses and decide what to pay attention to
  • Allocates tasks and monitors progress of different slave systems
  • Decides which tasks to attend to amid competing demands
  • Integrates information from the slave systems to solve problems
• What is the phonological loop?

  • Encodes acoustically
  • Has a limited capacity
  • It can articulate and rehearse sound-based information (which would otherwise decay rapidly)
  • Divided into two groups:
  • Phonological store (inner ear/holds words heard by speech/sound & has a 2 second duration)
  • Articulatory process (inner voice/a rehearsal system)
• What is the visuo-spatial sketchpad?

  • Encodes visually
  • Has a limited capacity
  • Allows us to store and manipulate images of objects
  • Allows us to keep track of where we are in relation to objects around us
• What is the episodic buffer?

  Integrates visuo-spatial and verbal information from the other slave systems into sequences (and so has a sense of time). It can access the LTM for stored information and knowledge.
• Positive evaluation of WMM: empirical evidence

  KF suffered brain damage from a motorcycle accident. KF impairment was mainly for verbal information - his memory for visual information was largely unaffected. This shows that there are separate STM components for visual information (VSSP) and verbal information (PL).
• Positive evaluation of WMM: brain damage

  Patients with damage to different areas of the brain show different impairments which might link to the different components of the WMM. People with damage to Broca's area are unable to generate words whereas people with damage to Wernicke's area are unable to understand speech. Broca's area may be site of articulatory process and Wernicke's area may be site of phonological store.
• Positive evaluation of WMM: Baddeley evidence

  Baddeley conducted an experiment. Participants had to track a moving spot of light whilst visualising the block capital letter F and deciding if each corner would touch the top or bottom of the lines on a page or not. Tracking and letter imagery tasks were competing for the limited resources of the VSSP so performance on this experiment was poor. However, when tracking task was paired with a verbal task (involving a repeating sound), performance was found to be better.
• Negative evaluation of WMM: Lieberman

  Lieberman noted that blind people have excellent spatial awareness, despite never having had and visual information. Lieberman argues that VSSP should be separated into two different components: one for visual information and one for spatial information.
• Negative evaluation of WMM: central executive

  Central executive is poorly understood. Little empirical evidence for its existence as it is difficult to study it in isolation from the slave systems. Evidence from neuropsychology suggests that brain damage leads to loss of different aspects of executive function for different individuals. Suggests that CE is not itself unitary but made up of different parts. Backed up by study by Eslinger and Damasio: patient EVR had a brain tumour removed and after had good reasoning but poor decision making.
• Label the working memory model:

  .

  A) Central executive

  B) Phonological loop

  C) Episodic buffer

  D) Visuo-spatial sketchpad

  E) LTM