Working Memory Model

• The working memory model was proposed by Baddeley and Hitch to account for some of the limitations of the multi-store model. -they felt that short-term memory consists of multiple stores and not just one unitary store -and that STM is an active process (hence working memory)
• Working memory is essentially a multi-component STM system. -Consists of central executives, which is described as an 'attentional process', it's a supervisory system in overall control, its role is to allocate tasks to the 3 slave systems (phonological loop, visuospatial and episodic buffer)
• The working memory model also consists of the phonological loop, which is made up of two subcomponents: the phonological store, which stores acoustic information and the articulatory system, which allows for sub-vocal repetition.
• The working memory model also consists of the visuospatial stores of visual information and manipulates mental images. It combines the visual and spatial information processed by other stores, giving us a 'complete picture'.
• The final component of the working memory model is the episodic buffer, which integrates all types of data processed by the other stores (e.g. auditory, visual-spatial, and semantic). So it's described as the storage component of the central executives, as well as being crucial for linking STM and LTM.
• The capacity of the phonological loop is determined by the length of time it takes to say the words. If the word is more than one syllable it is harder to remember. This makes it harder to store a list of long words such as 'association' or representatives, because it takes more than 2 seconds. This supports the working memory model because you can't rehearse longer words in a shorter amount of time.
• One weakness of the working memory model is that the central executives have not been precisely defined. For example, the term 'process' is vague, and the central executives may be made up of several sub-components or even be a part of a larger component itself in the working memory model. This lack of comprehensive explanation for each component of WMM draws doubts about the accuracy of its depiction of WMM. Meaning it can't be used to explain any experimental results and is probably more complex than currently represented.
• One strength of the WMM is that Shallice and Warrington provide more support to the WMM because their findings show that KF had very poor STM recall for auditory stimuli, but increased STM recall for visual stimuli. This suggests that the components of memory which process auditory and visual stimuli are separate (as described in WMM through the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad).
• Another strength of the WMM is studies of dual-task performance (e.g. Baddeley and Hitch) where each ppts must undertake a visual and verbal task simultaneously, shows decreased performance for such tasks and so supports the idea that the central executives have a very limited processing capacity and that the slave systems are in competition for these tasks and resources.
• Another weakness of the WMM is that some of the key evidence for the WMM comes from case studies of individuals who have suffered serious brain damage. This may not be reliable as the process of brain injury is traumatic, which may in itself change the behaviour so that a person performs worse in certain tasks.