WMM

• who proposed the wmm?

  Baddely and Hitch 1974.
• what does the WMM show?

  how STM is organised and works, concerned with the mental space that is active while temporarily storing and manipulating behaviour.
• what does the central executive CE do?

  coordinates the activities of the sub systems.
• what is the capacity for CE?

  very limited.
• how is information coded in the CE?

  its not.
• what are the three subsystems in the WMM?

  • phonological loop (PL) • visuospatial sketch pad (VSS) • episodic buffer (EB)
• what does the PL do?

  deals with auditory information.
• what are the two parts of the PL and what do they do?

  • articulatory processes - repeat words that are heard or seen like an inner voice. • phonological store - holds the words you hear and the order.
• what does the VSS do?

  deals with visual and spatial information. (what things look like and where they are in relation to other things).
• who suggested the VSS could be further split, and into what?

  Logie 1995 • visual cache - stores information about visual items e.g. form and colour. • inner scribe - stores arrangements of objects in the visual field.
• what does the episodic buffer do?

  it was added by baddeley in 2000 after the model was made as there was no store to hold the information that had been processed. it integrates information from the CE, PL and VSS, maintains a sense of time sequencing, and sends information to the LTM.
• what clinical evidence supports the WMM?

  patient KF (shallice and warrington 1970)• after brain injury, KF could process visual information but struggled with auditory information. - his immediate recall of letters and digits was stronger when he read them rather than heard. supporting the idea that they are distinct stores.
• what issue arises with case studies as clinical evidence?

  they are unpredictable and lack control over variables. e.g. KFs injury could have caused other cognitive impairments that affected his memory performance.
• how does studies into dual task performance support WMM?

  baddeley conducted a follow up study in which his participants were asked to carry out visual and verbal tasks simultaneously, their performance was similar to that when the tasks were carried out separately. when they were asked to simultaneously perform either two visual or two verbal tasks, performance substantially declined. this is because the two tasks of the same origin compete for the same subsystem.
• what is the counter argument with baddeleys follow up study on dual task performance?

  the tasks used lack ecological validity and dont reflect real world scenarios as they are performed in highly controlled lab settings.
• what is the main weakness of the WMM?

  the nature of the CE. baddeley said that the CE is the most important but least understood component of the WMM. the ambiguity challenges the integrity of the model as it should be more clearly specified what it's true nature is.