Working memory model

Question 1

What does the WMM present? Who?

Answer 1

Baddeley and Hitch developed the WMM which is a representation of how the STM functions and is organised. Each component is qualitatively different in terms of capacity and coding.

Question 2

Name each component of the WMM

Answer 2

Central executive
Phonological loop
Visuo-spatial sketchpad
Episodic buffer

Question 3

What does the Central Executive do?

Answer 3

The CE is the main part of the WMM and is responsible for thinking, reasoning and decision making. It controls the slave systems and can allocate tasks and resources. It has a very limited processing capacity and each sense is encoded differently into it.

Question 4

What is the Phonological Loop?

Answer 4

The PL deals with auditory information and preserves the order in which the information arrives.

Question 5

What is the Phonological Loop subdivided into?

Answer 5

Phonological store- deals with speech perception
Articulatory process- Allows maintenance rehearsal. The capacity of this ‘loop’ is about 2 seconds of the words you can say.

Question 6

What does the Visuo-spatial sketchpad do?

Answer 6

The VSS deals with visual and spatial information when required. Baddeley suggests that it has a limited capacity of 3-4 objects

Question 7

What is the VSS subdivided into?

Answer 7

Visual cache- stores information about form and colour of objects
Inner scribe- handles spatial relations

Question 8

What does the Episodic buffer do?

Answer 8

The episodic buffer integrates information from the VSS and PL and maintains a sense of time sequencing.
- Capacity of 4 chunks of information.
-Temporary storage system for the CE
-It helps with tasks that require both slave systems.
- Has links and communicates with the LTM

Question 9

Support for the WMM
(Baddeley)

Answer 9

Evidence that there are separate stores in the STM:
Baddeley showed that participants had more difficulty completing two visual tasks simultaneously than a visual and verbal task. This increased difficulty was because both visual tasks were competing for the same slave system. This increases the validity of the WMM as it suggests that there are different stores in the STM.

Question 10

Criticism for the WMM
(ecological validity)

Answer 10

However, a weakness of the WMM is that the dual task performance used to test the PL and VSS lacks ecological validity and mundane realism. The dual task performance is not a valid representation of everyday life. Therefore, it is hard to generalise the findings to real life.

Question 11

Support for the WMM
(KF)

Answer 11

Evidence to support different stores in the STM:There is a wealth of evidence from brain damaged patients that supports the working memory model.

Shallice and Warrington (1970) studied patient KF who had suffered brain damage. After the damage, KF had poor STM ability for verbal information but could process visual information fine.

This suggests that his phonological loop had been damaged leaving other areas of memory intact. His VSS was intact. Therefore this supports the existence of a separate visual and acoustic store.
This supports the WMM. However, evidence from brain-damaged patients may not be reliable because it concerns unique cases with patients who have had traumatic experiences.
It is not generalisable as these unique things happen to unique patients so you cant compare to healthy people.