working memory model

• The central executive is modality free (can process information from any of the 5 senses), it is able to briefly process different forms of information e.g., acoustic, visual, haptic etc. the central executive (CE) is essentially an attentional process that has a ‘supervisory’ role. It focuses, divides, and switches our limited attention. It monitors incoming data, making decisions and allocates tasks to slave subsystems. The CE has a very limited processing capacity and does not store information.
• The phonological loop is a slave system which temporarily stores verbal information. It deals with auditory information, so encoding is acoustic. It preserves the order in which the information arrives. The phonological loop is divided into the articulatory process, which allows maintenance rehearsal, repeating sounds, or words in a ‘loop’ to keep them in the phonological store while they are needed. The capacity of this ‘loop’ is believed to be 2 seconds.
• example of phonological loop = when you repeat a phone number to yourself whilst you search for a pen to write it down. The phonological store, which stores auditory information for example, you will be able to hold an auditory memory of your teachers last sentence when she dictates notes to you in class.
• The visuospatial sketchpad can temporarily store visual or spatial information when required. For example, if you ask someone for directions you can briefly hold a visual map of your route to follow it. This subsystem also has a limited capacity, which according to Baddeley (2003) is about three or four objects.
• episodic buffer was a temporary store that integrates the acoustic, visual, and spatial information processing by other subsystems. It also maintains a sense of time sequencing, basically recording events (episodes) that are happening. It has a limited capacity of about four chunks. It combines information from the other subsystems with long term memory and links it to wider cognitive processes such as perception.
• example of episodic buffer = you may use your episodic buffer to bring to mind a visual image of your house (LTM) and manipulate it to count how many windows it has (visuo-spatial) whilst sub-vocalising you’re counting so that you don’t lose count (articulatory).
• One strength of this model is that there is supporting evidence to prove the existence of the different slave systems and how attention is split between them. In Baddeley’s experiment, participants were told to follow a light over the letter F whilst doing another visual task. He found that participants performed worse when doing two tasks of the same nature e.g., visual, and visual, compared to a visual and verbal task.
• This is a strength as it shows that the visual task of following the letter F was controlled by the Visio-spatial sketch pad and the verbal task was controlled by the phonological loop, the central executive splits the attention between the two slave systems so that one of them doesn’t overwork itself causing the person to forget.
• A weakness is that the role of the central executive is too vague as we don’t know what ‘directing attention’ and ‘allocating resources’ really means. Eslinger’s case study of a man with brain damage showed that his reasoning was good, and he coped well on interference tasks in a memory test which shows that his central executive was working but performed poorly on decision making.
• This is a weakness as both tasks require the central executive however, he was only able to do one of them showing that the central executive may not be as simple and probably has many more executive controls. If the central executive were a single system, we would expect all or none of these abilities to be affected, therefore this case suggests the central executive is not a single system.