AO3 - Working Memory Model

• Research to support the WMM was conducted by Shallice and Warrington on patient KF, who suffered with amnesia. They found that KF’s recall in STM for digits was very poor when the digits were read aloud to him, but recall was much better when KF could visually see the digits himself. This supports the WMM because it suggests that there must be different stores within the STM, one to process visual information (VSS) and one to process auditory information (PL), as the PL was damaged but the VSS intact.
• However, critics would argue that the case study to support the WMM is flawed, as it has low population validity. The research was a case study of just one person, patient KF, who has an unusual illness involving damage to the brain. Therefore, it is difficult to generalise the findings to the wider population as their STM may operate differently, thus limiting the support that the research provides for the working memory model of memory.
• Studies of dual task performance support the idea of separate components in the STM and that they have a limited capacity. Baddeley found that participants had more difficulty when performing two visual tasks at the same time than when performing one of the tasks alone or one of the visual tasks with a verbal task. Supporting the WMM as it suggests that both visual tasks are competing for limited capacity of the same slave system (VSS) whereas when doing two tasks simultaneously, they are delegated to separate slave systems and performance is not reduced, increasing the WMM's credibility.