Working Memory Model

• who proposed the WMM?

  - Baddeley and Hitch (1974)
• what is the WMM?

  - theoretical cognitive model, created to re[lace the STM store in the MSM

  - an active processor made of multiple stores, whereas STM is passive and unitary
• outline the central executive


  - head of the model, receives sense information, controls attention & filters information before passing on to the subsystems

  - limited in capacity (4 items) and capable of dealing with only 1 strand of information at a time
• outline the phonological loop


  - processes sound information (acoustic coding)

  - contains, primary acoustic store: inner ear, storing words recently heard; and articulatorio process: inner voice, story via sub-vocal repetition

  - capacity of 2 secs
• outline the visuo-spatial sketch pad


  - processes visual & spatial information

  - contains,visual cache: a passive store of form and colour; and the inner scribe: active store of relationships in 3D space
• outline the episodic buffer


  - added to the WMM by Baddeley in 2000, as the model needed a general store to hold and combine information from VSS, PL, CE and long-term memory
• A03 - Baddeley


  - asked to do 2 visual tasks (tracking moving lights & describing angles of letter F) or a visual/verbal task

  - found that performances was much better when the tasks were not using the same processing

  - this suggests that the VSS and PL are separate systems
• A03 - Prabhakaran


  - ppts in fMRI's completed tasks with integrate or separate spatial and verbal information

  - more activation was found in the prefrontal cortex when information is integrated and in posterior brain regions when separate

  - this suggests the EB exists and is in the prefrontal cortex
• A03 - inferences


  - it is impossible to directly observe the processes of memory described in models like the WMM

  - this means inferences must be made, and these could be incorrect
• A03 - criticism of WMM


  - criticised the central executive as a concept that does not have a full explanation of its function

  - eg, Baddeley admitted the concept needs development, and including the EB is part of this