the working memory model

Question 1

what is the WMM? (baddeley and hitch, 1974)

Answer 1

• an explanation of how STM is organised and how it functions
• it is concerned with the ‘mental space’ that is active when we are temporarily storing and manipulating information eg. when playing chess
• the four main components are qualitatively different, especially in terms of coding and capacity

Question 2

what are the four main components of the WMM?

Answer 2

1. central executive
2. phonological loop
3. visuo-spatial sketchpad
4. episodic buffer

Question 3

what is the central executive and what does it do? (CE)

Answer 3

• has a supervisory role
• monitors incoming data
• focuses and divides our limited attention
• allocates subsystems to tasks
• CE has a very limited processing capacity and does not store information

Question 4

what is the role of the phonological loop? (PL)

Answer 4

• deals with auditory information ie. coding is acoustic
• preserves the order in which the information arrives

Question 5

what are the subdivisions of the PL?

Answer 5

• phonological store: stores the words you hear
• articulatory process: allows maintenance rehearsal (repeating sounds or words in a ‘loop’ to keep them in working memory while they are needed)
  > the capacity of the ‘loop’ is believed to be two seconds’ worth of what you can say

Question 6

what is the role of the visuo-spatial sketchpad? (VSS)

Answer 6

• stores visual and / or spatial information when required
• has limited capacity
  > according to baddeley (2003) is about three or four objects

Question 7

what did robert logie (1995) subdivide the VSS into?

Answer 7

• visual cache: stores visual data
• inner scribe: records the arrangement of objects in the visual field

Question 8

what is the episodic buffer? (EB)

Answer 8

• added by baddeley in 2000
• temporary store for information, integrating the visual, spatial and verbal information processed by other stores
• maintains a sense of time sequencing ie. recording events that are happening
• can be seen as the storage component of the CE
• has a limited capacity of about four chunks (baddeley 2012)
• EB links working memory to long-term memory and wider cognitive processes such as perception

Question 9

evaluation: clinical evidence

Answer 9

• shallice and warrington’s (1970) case study of patient KF
• after his brain injury, KF had poor STM ability for auditory information but could process visual information normally
• eg. his immediate recall of letters and 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 finding strongly supports the existence of separate visual and acoustic memory stores

Question 10

evaluation: lack of controlled variables in case studies

Answer 10

• it is unclear whether KF had other cognitive impairments apart from damage to his PL which might have affected his performance on memory tasks
• eg. his injury was caused by a motorcycle accident and the trauma involved may have affected his cognitive performance apart from any brain injury
• this challenges evidence that comes from clinical studies of people with brain injuries that may have affected many different systems

Question 11

evaluation: dual-task performance supports the existence of the visuo-spatial sketchpad

Answer 11

• baddeley et al.’s (1975) participants carried out a visual and verbal task at the same time (dual task) and their 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), whereas there is no competition when performing a verbal and a visual task together
• this shows that there must be a separate subsystem (the VSS) that processes visual input, and another one for verbal processing (the PL)

Question 12

evaluation: lack of clarity of the nature of the central executive

Answer 12

• baddeley (2003) said ‘the central executive is the most important but the least understood component of working memory’
• the 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 and this challenges the integrity of the WMM

Question 13

evaluation: validity issues

Answer 13

• dual-task studies use tasks that are very 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)
• they are also carried out in highly-controlled lab conditions (eg. where the presentation of the stimuli is precisely timed)
• this means that the stimuli have low mundane realism and the participants may be subject to demand characteristics