Evaluation

• The case of KF supports the separate STM stores. Shalice and Warrington carried out a study on a patient kf who had brain damage. He had poor stm ability for verbal information but could process visual information so his phonological loop had been damaged but other areas of memory were intact. This suggests that there are separate visual and acoustic stores.
• One strength of the WMM is that it explains results of dual task studies. Badley et al found participants had difficulty performing 2 visual tasks than doing a visual and verbal task at the same time. The greater difficulty is because both visual tasks compete for the same limited resources whereas there is no competition in doing a verbal and visual task simultaneously. This provides existence for the visuo spatial sketchpad.
• One limitation is that it lacks clarity over the central executive. Cognitive psychologists suggests that the central executive is unsatisfactory and doesn’t really explain anything. The central executive should be more clearly specified than just simply attention therefore may have low ecological validity .
• Psychologist have criticised the visuo spatial sketchpad. Lieberman 1980 said that the VSS implies that all spatial information was first visual however he points out that blind people have excellent spatial awareness although they never had any visual information. Liberman argues that the VSS should be separated into 2 different components, one for visual information and one for spatial.
• The WMM Is supported by brain studies. Braver et Al made partcipants complete a task involving the central executive while they were having brain scans. These scans showed that activity seen in the prefrontal cortex increased as the task became harder. This makes sense as demands on the CE increases it has to work harder to fulfil its function Another strength is that it has real life application as the working memory can be applied to real life tasks such as reading uses the phonological loop problem solving central executive and navigation visual spatial sketchpad.