AO3: WMM

• Real life evidence from brain damaged patients

  KF had a damaged short term memory, being poorest at audio tasks compared to visual tasks. This suggests that KF's brain damage was restricted to his phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad remained functioning. This therefore supports the idea of separate stores.
• Real life evidence from brain scans

  In brain scanning, the left prefrontal cortex was found to be active during CE tasks. As the tasks increased in difficulty, so did activity as the CE became overloaded. This supports the WMM as it shows that different areas of the brain are responsible for processing different information so therefore STM must be multiple stores.
• Dual task studies


  Baddeley and Hitch found that participants were slower in a dual task study that involved completing a digit span test and a verbal reasoning task (True or False questions). As the number of digits increased, ppts took longer to answer but not by much (fraction of a second), they also didn't make any more errors. This again supports the WMM as the tasks use different stores (phonological loop and central executive) so don't get confused and therefore accuracy is hardly effected.
• Real life applications


  Phonological loop has a role in reading- allows for measures and understanding of dementia- as phonological loop becomes overloaded.

  ADHD and WMM impairments- teaching strategies can be introduced to ensure that students can access tasks and work.

  This is a strength because we can develop methods f helping people who have dyslexia or ADHD to help them live more 'normal' lives or make it easier and more accessible.
• Issues with BDP

  There are issues with using evidence from KF to support a whole model- we don't know if KF had issues with attention before the injury or if something else was causing underperformance. This is a weakness because we cannot replicate such studies on others and therefore it's difficult to generalise findings on how all STM works (low population validity).
• Lack of clarity of central executive


  Not developed as the WMM identifies it as solely attention, it is not clearly explained nor understood. Eslinger and Damasio studied EVR who had a brain tumour removed. Performed well on verbal reasoning tasks but had more decision making skills, suggesting that the CE was intact but not fully. This shows that the CE is more complex than the WMM which challenges the integrity of the model.