The Working Memory Model Flashcards
What is the Central Executive?
It has a supervisory role, monitoring incoming data, and focuses and divides our limited attention and allocates subsystems to tasks. It has a very limited processing capacity and doesn’t store information.
What is the Phonological Loop?
It deals with auditory information, codes acoustically, and preserves the order in which information arrives. It is divided into:
The phonological store: which stores the words you hear
The articulatory process: allows maintenance rehearsal. The capacity of this is thought to be 2 seconds.
What is the Visio-Spatial Sketchpad?
It stores visual and spatial information. It has a limited capacity, which is 3/4 objects. It is divided into:
Visual cache - stores visual data
Inner scribe - records the arrangement of objects in the visual field.
What is the episodic buffer?
This was added later by Baddeley, which is a temporary store for information, integrating the visual, spatial and verbal information processed by other stores and maintaining a sense of time sequencing. It is the storage component of the CE and has limited capacity - 4 chunks. Links WM to LTM.
What is the strength - Shallice and Warrington?
KF has poor STM for auditory information but could process visual information normally. His immediate recall of letters and digits was better when he read them , suggesting his PL was damaged but his VSS was intact.
What is the limitation - KF?
KF might have had other cognitive impairments which might have affected his performance on memory tasks. The trauma involved in his accident may have affected his cognitive performance as well as the injury. This challenges evidence from studies of people with brain injuries that may have affected different systems.
What is the strength - Baddeley?
Baddeley’s experiment involved PPs doing 1 verbal and 1 visual task, then 2 visual tasks. They found that both tasks were achieved when it was 1 of each, but impossible when it was 2 of the same. This shows that there must be separate systems for visual and verbal information.
What is the limitation - CE?
The CE has a lack of clarity. Baddeley said it was the least understood, and may consist of sub-components. This challenges the integrity of the WMM.
