the working memory model Flashcards
what is the WMM? (baddeley and hitch, 1974)
- an explanation of how STM is organised and how it functions
- about the mental space active when we are temporarily storing and manipulating information
what are the four main components of the WMM?
- central executive
- phonological loop
- visuo-spatial sketchpad
- episodic buffer
what is the central executive and what does it do? (CE)
- supervisory role
- monitors incoming data
- focuses and divides our limited attention
- allocates subsystems to tasks
what is the capacity of the CE?
- very limited processing capacity
- does not store information
what is the role of the phonological loop? (PL)
- deals with auditory information
- preserves the order in which the information arrives
what type of coding does the PL have?
acoustic
what are the subdivisions of the PL?
- phonological store: stores the words you hear
- articulatory process: allows maintenance rehearsal
what is maintenance rehearsal in the PL?
repeating sounds or words in a loop to keep them in working memory while they are needed
what is the capacity of maintenance rehearsal believed to be? (PL)
two seconds worth of what you can say
what is the role of the visuo-spatial sketchpad? (VSS)
to store visual and / or spatial information when required
what is the capacity of the VSS?
- limited capacity
- 3 to 4 objects (baddeley 2003)
what did logie (1995) subdivide the VSS into?
- visual cache: stores visual data
- inner scribe: records the arrangement of objects in the visual field
what is the episodic buffer? (EB)
- added by baddeley (2000)
- temporary store for information
- can be seen as the storage component of the CE
what is the role of the EB?
- to maintain a sense of time sequencing ie. recording events that are happening
- to integrate the visual, spatial and verbal information processed by other stores
- to link WM to LTM and wider cognitive processes eg. perception
what is the capacity of the EB?
- limited capacity
- about 4 chunks (baddeley 2012)
evaluation: clinical evidence (shallice and warrington 1970)
- case study of patient KF
- after brain injury, KF had poor STM ability for auditory info but could process visual info normally
- eg. immediate recall of letters & digits was better when he read them (visual) than when they were read to him (acoustic)
- ie. KF’s PL was damaged but his VSS was intact
- this strongly supports the existence of separate visual and acoustic memory stores
evaluation: lack of controlled variables in case studies (KF)
- unclear if KF had cognitive impairments other than damage to PL which affected performance on memory tasks
- eg. injury was caused by a motorcycle accident; trauma involved may have affected his cognitive performance apart from any brain injury
- this challenges evidence from clinical studies of people with brain injuries that may have affected many different systems
evaluation: dual-task performance supports the existence of the VSS (baddeley et al. 1975)
- ps carried out a visual and verbal task at the same time (dual task)
- performance on each was similar to when they carried out the tasks separately
- when both tasks were visual or both were verbal, performance on both declined substantially
- this is because both visual tasks compete for the same subsystem (VSS), but there is no competition when performing a verbal and a visual task together
- therfore, there must be a separate subsystem (VSS) that processes visual input, and another one for verbal processing (PL)
evaluation: lack of clarity of the nature of the CE
- baddeley (2003): ‘the CE is the most important but the least understood component of WM
- CE needs to be more clearly specified than just simply being ‘attention’
- eg. some psychologists believe the CE may consist of separate subcomponents
- this means the CE is an unsatisfactory component, which challenges the integrity of the WMM
evaluation: validity issues of dual-task studies
- they use tasks that are unlike the tasks we perform in our everyday lives (eg. identifying the correct orders of letters such as A and B, recalling random sequences of letters)
- carried out in highly-controlled lab conditions (eg. where presentation of stimuli is precisely timed)
- therefore, stimuli have low mundane realism
- ps may be subject to demand characteristics
