Working Memory Model Flashcards
What are the key components of the working memory model?
- The Central Executive
- The Phonological Loop
- The Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad
- Episodic Buffer
What is the role of the Central Executive?
- Is the main part of the working memory that controls the other ’slave components’ and decides which component is required for the task/information being processed
- Can process information from different senses - each sense is coded differently
- The CE has little to no capacity
- It is involved in higher mental processes such as decision making and reasoning
How does the Central Executive handle multiple tasks?
- The CE may have to multiple tasks at once
- The CE decides what the working memory pays attention to
- It allocates attentional demands to the ‘slave components’ by deciding which task is most important and should be handled first
How does multitasking become easier?
With practice tasks become automated and require less capacity (fewer attentional demands) or the Central Executive. This frees us to perform other tasks.
What is the role of the Phonological Loop?
The Phonological Loop codes information acoustically. It has 2 parts
1. The Primary Acoustic Store:
2. The Articulatory Process
What are the features of the Primary Acoustic Store?
- This is linked to speech perception
- A short term store that receives acoustic information and holds it for approximately 1-2s
- It remembers sounds in the same order they were presented
What are the features of the Articulatory Process?
- Linked to speech perception
- Capacity = 2 seconds of speech
- Used to rehearse and STORE sounds collected by the Primary Acoustic store
- Information from the Primary Acoustic Store is repeated in the loop to prevent decay
What is the role of the Visuo Spatial Sketchpad
Codes and rehearses info through visualising mental pictures
Has limited capacity of 3-4 objects
It has 2 parts
1. Visual Cache - stores passive visual info about form, shape, and colour
2. Inner Scribe - handles spatial relations (e.g. following a mental map), rehearses and transfers info to visual cache to central executive
What is the role of the episodic buffer?
- Takes info from visuo-spatial Sketchpad and phonological loop and integrates them together
- Helps with tasks that require both slave systems e.g. following satnav directions
- Temporal storage system
- Limited capacity of 4 chunks of info
- Has 2 way communication with LTM - can retrieve and return info when it’s needed by working memory
How do Baddeley and Hitch support the Working Memory Model?
- One strength of the WMM is that there is research support from dual task studies
- Baddeley and Hitch found that PPs could perform verbal tasks in the AL and separate task in the CE without affecting recall as the different tasks took up capacity from different stores
- Found that PPs struggled to perform similar tasks (both in AL) recall on the first task was affected
- This is a strength because it shows that the STM consists of multiple separate stores with limited capacities
- This was shown as PPs could easily complete tasks that work on different slave systems but performing 2 similar tasks (activating the same slave system) caused recall on the first task to be impaired as the capacity was overloaded
- This validates the WMM
How do Cohen et al support the Working Memory Model?
- One strength of the WMM is that there is research support from brain scans
- Cohen et al found that brain activity was higher in the Broca’s area (linked to speech production) when doing a verbal task whereas the occipital lobe (linked to visual processing) when doing a task using the VSSP
- This is a strength because it provides physiological evidence for the existence of the PL and VSSP
- It also supports to PL’s role in auditory and speech based tasks and the VSSP’s role in visual task
- This validates the WMM
How does the unitary view of the central executive weaken the Working Memory Model?
- One limitation is that there is evidence against the unitary view of the CE
- When EVR had a tumour removed they they did well on test that required reasoning but had poor decision making skills (spent hours to decide where to eat)
- This is a weakness because the CE is involved in higher mental processes such as reasoning and decision making
- If the CE was a unitary store as the WMM states, then higher mental processes would be completely normal or completely damaged. EVR’s case shows some processes of the CE can remain intact while others are damaged
- This shows that there are different components of the CE that handle different types on info
- This decreases the validity of the WMM
How does Berz weaken the Working Memory Model?
- A weakness of the WMM is that it doesn’t account for all types of memory
- E.g. Berz found PPs were able to listen to instrumental music without their performance on other acoustic tasks (at the same time) being impaired
- This is a weakness because according to the WMM performing both acoustic tasks simultaneously would overload the capacity of the phonological loop thus impairing performance - this was not the case
- This indicates there may be a separate ‘musical memory store’ with its own independent capacity to deal with the instrumental task, contradicting the WMM
- Therefore the WMM is incomplete as it fails to account for all types of memory thus reducing its validity
