Lesson 6 Evaluation of Working Memory Model

Question 1

Neurobiological evidence of WMM Shallice and Warrington (1970)

Answer 1

+ Shallice and Warrington (1970) reported the case study of KF who, because of a motorbike accident, had poor Short-Term Memory (STM) for words that were presented verbally but not for words that were presented visually. This suggests that there is more than one type of STM, as the Working Memory Model (WMM) suggests. In particular, it shows that we have a type of STM for verbal tasks (phonological loop) and another for visual (visuo spatial sketchpad).

Question 2

Laboratory experiments Baddeley and Hitch (1974) and Baddeley (1975)

Answer 2

+ Baddeley and Hitch (1974) gave participants a dual task. They were asked to complete a reasoning task, which uses the central executive, at the same time as a reading aloud task, which uses the phonological loop. Participants could do both tasks simultaneously very well, supporting the idea of separate components in STM.

+ Baddeley et al. (1975) gave participants brief visual presentations of lists of words. These words were made up either of short words or long words. Participants were asked to recall the list immediately in the correct order. It was found that participants could recall more short words than long ones. Baddeley (1975) called this the word length effect and concluded that it supports the idea that the phonological loop can hold as many items as can be said in 1.5 to 2 seconds rather than being limited by 7 (+/- 2) items as the multi-store model (MSM) argues.

Question 3

General Evaluation of WMM

Answer 3

+ The WMM has practical applications; it has improved understanding of how people learn to read and so helped psychologists to assist those with Dyslexia who can struggle with reading.

• Several psychologists have criticised the WMM because they think the idea of a central executive is vague and untestable. Damasio (1985) presented the case of EVR who had a cerebral tumour removed. He had good reasoning skills, which suggested his central executive was intact, but he could not make decisions, which suggests his central executive was damaged. This case study strongly indicates that the central executive is more complicated than the WMM claims.