WMM

• Baddeley & Hitch (1974) believed that the MSM was too simplistic in terms of the stores.

  They developed a model which focused on STM only ad argued that it was not a unitary store like the MSM argued.
• 1. central executive
  2. visuospatial sketchpad
  3. episodic buffer
  4. phonological loop
  5. articulatory system
  6. phonological store
  7. long term memory

  
• the central executive -

  • Has a ‘supervisory role’
  • Monitors incoming data, divides our limited attention and allocates ‘slave systems’ to tasks
  • Has a very limited capacity and does not store information
• the phonological loop -

  • Deals with auditory info (acoustic coding)
  • Capacity – around 2 secs worth of what you can say
  • Split into 2 subdivisions: phonological store and articulatory process
• phonological store -

  • Stores words you hear
  • ‘Inner ear’
• Articulatory process -

  • allows maintenance rehearsal 
  • inner voice’
• visuo-spatial setchpad -

  • Stores visual/spatial info (visual coding)
  • Limited capacity of 3-4 objects
  • Divided into 2 subdivisions: visual cache and inner scribe
• visual cache -

  • stores visual data
• inner scribe -

  • Records the arrangement of objects e.g. calculate 16 + 25 using column method
• episodic buffer -

  • Added to the model later in 2000
  • Acts as a temporary store for all info
  • Can be seen as the storage component of the central executive
  • Limited capacity of around 4 chunks
  • Links STM to LTM
• According to the working memory model (WMM), short-term memory is an active store used to hold information which is being manipulated. Logie (1999) refers to it as the ‘desktop of the brain’- it holds material in our conscious mind long enough for us to manipulate it and use it to make a decision or execute a task.
• strength -

  Baddeley and Hitch found pps were slower at a true/false task whilst also completing a task using both the central executive and articulatory loop compared to a task using just the articulatory loop.

  Completing 2 tasks which involve the same stores causes difficulty and suggests that there must be different slave systems with different roles.
• strength -

  After a brain injury, KF had poor STM for auditory info but could process visual info normally e.g. his immediate recall of letters was better when he read them (visual) than when they were read to him (auditory)

  This strongly supports the existence of separate visual and auditory stores.
• weakness -

  However, it is unclear whether KF had other cognitive impairments which may have impacted his memory.

  This challenges the evidence that comes from clinical studies of people with brain damage that may have affected many different systems
• weakness -

  Despite providing more detail of STM than the MSM, the WMM has been criticized for being too simplistic and vague, e.g. it is unclear what the central executive is

  Calls into question the validity of the model and suggests a more detailed model may have more practical benefits