Working memory model Flashcards
Who proposed the working memory model?
Baddeley and Hitch in 1974
What is the central executive?
Described as a limited capacity component involved in general processing.
It was noted as a homunculus with a supervisory role in deciding how the two slave systems should function.
Regarded as having little capacity but with the ability to deal with different types of sensory information
What is the phonological loop?
Is a slave system that deals with temporary storage of verbal information.
Believed to have two components: the phonological store and the articulatory rehearsal system.
What is the phonological store?
Only able to hold a limited amount of verbal information for a few seconds, but this could be extended if information was subvocalised or refreshed.
What is the articulatory rehearsal?
Used to explain the word length effect, where short monosyllabic words were recalled more successfully then longer polysyllabic words.
What is the visuospatial sketchpad?
The slave system of working memory was described to temporarily hold and manipulate verbal and spatial information.
The VSSP can deal with visuospatial information either directly through observing images or by retrieving visuospatial information from LTM.
The role of the VSSP is to maintain and integrate visual and spatial information from different channels using a visual code
Support from a case study
KF suffered brain damage after a motorcycle accident and he could process visual information but struggled with verbal information. This supports the existence of two separate visual and verbal stores in STM.
Because it would seem like his phonological loop is only store to have been affected and his visuo-spatial sketchpad was still functional
Support from brain scanning studies
Smith (1996) used brain scans to show how different areas of the brain are active when doing visual or verbal tasks suggesting the phonological loop and visuo-spatial sketchpad are separate systems.
This provides support for the subdivisions of the separate visual and verbal stores as they are located in different parts of the brain.
Not all aspects of the model are fully understood
The model has been argued to be able to be used to help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
These children have deficits in working memory and the model can provide practical suggestions for helping these children.
EG, by breaking down instructions into simple manageable chunks with frequent repetition.
What is a significant limitation with the model?
Its inability to explain why we could store only a limited number of word sequences in the phonological loop but could store far longer sentence sequences.
It seemed that word sequences in the form of sentences could be bound together by meaning
What is a further problem with the model?
Did not explain evidence from the verbal span experiments that verbal and visual encoding could be combined.
The model could not explain how subcomponents could interface each other or with LTM.
Baddeley addressed this in the 2000 addition called the episodic buffer
What is the episodic buffer?
Proposed as a limited capacity storage system that could integrate information between the subcomponents and feed into and retrieve information from long term memory
