What is one piece of Clinical Evidence that supports the WMM?
KF. He had poor STM ability for auditory information but could process visual information normally - his recall of letters and digits was better when he read them (visual) than when they were read to him (acoustic). KF's phonological loop was damaged but his visuo-spatial sketchpad was intact.
What is the counterpoint for the clinical evidence supporting the WMM?
It is unclear whether KF had other cognitive impairments which might have affected his performance on memory tasks - for example, he was involved in a motorcycle accident and the trauma may have affected his cognitive performance.
Dual-task performance
One strength is that studies of dual-task performance support the existence of the visuo-spatial sketchpad:
Baddeley et al. - participants carried out verbal and visual tasks at the same time, their performance was the same as when they did it separately.
When both were verbal or visual performance declined substantially - this is because both tasks are competing for the VSS
This shows that there must be a separate subsystem (VSS) that processes visual info, and one for verbal processing (PL)
Nature of the central executive
One limitation is that there is a lack of clarity over the nature of the central executive:
Baddeley recognised this when he said 'The central executive is the most important but the least understood component of the working memory'
The CE needs to be more clearly specified than just being simply 'attention'
This means that the CE is an unsatisfactory component and this challenges the integrity of the WMM
