working memory

• LIMITATION:

  • There is a lack of clarity over the nature of the central executive
  • Baddeley 2003 himself recognised that the central executive was the most important yet the most misunderstood
  • The CE needs to be more clearly specified rather than just attention
  • For example some psychologists believe that the CE may consists of separate subcomponents
  • This means that the CE is an unsatisfactory component and this challenges the integrity of the WMM
• LIMITATION:

  • However, it is unclear whether KF had other cognitive impairments (apart from damage to his phonological loop) which may have affected his performance on memory tasks
  • For example: his injury was caused by a motorcycle accident.
  • The trauma involved may have affected his cognitive performance quite apart from any brain injury
  • This challenged evidence that comes from clinical studies of people with brain injury that may have affected many different systems
• STRENGTH:

  • Support from Shallice and Warrington (1970) case study of patient KF
  • After his brain injury KF had poor STM ability for auditory information but could process visual information normally
  • For instance, his immediate recall of letters and digits was better when he read them (visual) than when they were being read to them (acoustic)
  • KF phonological loop was damaged but his visuo- spatial sketachpad was intact
  • This finding supports the existence of separate visual and acoustic memory stores