Memory: The Working Memory Flashcards
What is a limitation of the working memory ?
It falls victim to the homunculus argument. A homunculus argument is a fallacy that attempts to explain one thing in terms of another concept without explaining how those concepts work. Baddeley himself has recognised that the central executive resembles a homunculus. There is no way of explaining how the central executive directs the other slave systems. This posses danger for infinite regression, where the CE must be controlled by another system which must be explained by another system and so on. Therefore a limitation of the WMM is that the workings of the central component of it remains essentially a mystery.
What is supporting research of the Working Memory Model?
A Case Study provides evidence that the WMM is a superior model of STM than the MSM. Patient KF suffered brain damage that left him with an impaired ability to recall acoustic information yet a normal short term memory for visual information. This cannot be explained by the MSM as it only has a single STM store. In contrast it can be explained by the WMM as it has separate visual and acoustic stores. If they are separate then it is feasible that one store could be damages and the other remain intact. However, the problem with the support for the WMM is that it relies on a case study. This particular case study is difficult to generalise to the wider public. Therefore, although this study does provide support for the WMM, it is limited due to its reliance on case study evidence.
What is a Strength of the Working Memory Model?
It has had real life applications in education. The idea that the WMM has a limited capacity to process information means the learner can only store and manipulate a finite amount of information at one time. Due to this insight, educators are encouraged to reduce the cognitive load of their lessons, as information cannot be processed by WM . E.g teachers should avoid lecturing their students otherwise information whilst simultaneously presenting verbal information from a PowerPoint as this will overload the capacity of the students phonological loop, resulting in a lessened intake of information. Similarly, teachers shouldn’t assign multiple tasks at once even if these fall under different slave systems as it will still require too much attentional resources, meaning the capacity of the central executive will overload. Furthermore, teachers should understand that the WM can process information more efficiently once students have successfully transferred information into schemas in their LTM, meaning teachers should check students have understood material before moving onto more challenging tasks. Finally, teachers should be especially mindful of heavy cognitive load to those students with working memory deficits (e.g ADHD and dyslexia), therefore should break complex tasks into more manageable chunks which are less overwhelming. Overall, we can understand that a strength of WM is that it can be of practical use to inform educators how to improve their teaching.
What is the Central Executive? And what are its TWO functions?
It is the controlling system of the working memory.
Functions include:
1. It is the system which controls all the slave systems
2. It directs the internal mental processes of attention.
What is the Phonological Loop? And its responsibilities?
- It is a slave system of the working memory.
- Responsible for processing and storing verbal information which codes acoustically.
What are the TWO sub sections of the Phonological loop?
- The Phonological Store: responsible for temporarily storing the sounds of verbal information that enters working memory. It has a limited capacity and duration.
- The Articulatory process: allows for maintenance rehearsal of verbal information, increasing the duration of the phonological loop. The capacity of information can be rehearsed in 2 seconds.
Acoustic verbal information vs written language.
Acoustic verbal information enters directly into the phonological loop but written language is first processed by the visual spatial sketch pad then sent to the articulatory process where the rehearsal turns it into phonological information that we hear.
What is the Visual-spatial sketchpad?
Stores and processes visual and spatial information.
It has a limited capacity, holding between 3 to 4 objects.
What are the TWO sub systems in the Visual-spatial sketchpad?
- The visual cache: responsible for storing information about the shape and colour of objects in visual field. > allows a person to identify WHAT an object is.
- The inner scribe: responsible for dealing with spatial movement and information.
> allows a person to identify WHERE an object is.
What is the Episodic Buffer?
- It’s the final slave system, which has the role to integrate information from different sources into a single coherent representation.
- It has a limited capacity of 4 chunks of information that act as temporary stores for information from other parts of the WM as well as information received from the LTM.
What does “time stamp” refer to in the Episodic Buffer?
Means each consolidated chunk of information has a sense of time, allowing us to have a sense of chronology to the information we process in WM.
Explain the role of the LTM in WM.
- The role of the LTM, is if instructed by the CE, the episodic buffer will retrieve information from LTM and integrate it into an episode.
- Transferring information to schemas within LTM helps working memory because it can enable more efficient processing of sensory information entering the WM, meaning there is less of a burden on the limited additional resources of the CE, enabling WM to process more info.
