Working memory model

Question 1

who came up with the idea of the WMM and when?

Answer 1

Baddeley Hitch (1974)

Question 2

why did Baddeley create the WMM?

Answer 2

as an alternative to the MSM

• he believed that the STM was more complex and had a bigger role in memory.
• he believed the STM was made up of more than one component.

Question 3

what are the four components of the WMM?

Answer 3

• central executive
• phonological loop
• episodic buffer
• visuospatial sketchpad

Question 4

what does the central executive do?

Answer 4

• directs attention to tasks and decides what the working memory pays attention to (gives priorities to certain activities)
• it’s responsible for monitoring, coordinating and combining the operation of slave systems.
• it collects information in a number of different stores (e.g sensory info from the environment)
• it selects strategies but can only do a number of things at the same time.

Question 5

what does the phonological loop do?

Answer 5

• deals with auditory information
• it’s made up of the phonological store and the articulary control system.

phonological store: acts as an inner ear
-spoken words enter the store directly for 1-2 seconds before fading away

articulary control system: acts as an inner voice

• visually presented words must be converted into spoken code before entering the phonological store.
• words seen or heard are silently repeated (looped) like an inner voice. this is a kind of maintenance rehearsal.

Question 6

what does the visuospatial sketchpad do?

Answer 6

acts as an inner eye

deals temporarily with visual (what things look like) and spatial (relations between objects) information.

Question 7

what does the episodic buffer do?

Answer 7

• this component has recently been added to the model and is more of a general store.
• it is a temporary capacity store, binding verbal, visual and spatial information, allowing the subsystems to interact.
• the sub-systems additionally interact between WM (STM) and LTM.

Question 8

what’s a piece of supporting evidence for the WMM?

phonological store

Answer 8

Baddeley et al (1975) -word length effect
carried out research to investigate how word length affects the phonological loop. He found that participants remembered lists of short words better than long words because the short words could be processed faster before the memory trace decays (within two seconds). Longer words couldn’t fit on the phonological loop. This suggests that the phonological store has a limited capacity.

Question 9

what’s a piece of supporting evidence for the WMM?

central executive

Answer 9

Baddeley and hitch (1976)- Dual-task performance
during the research investigating dual-task performance, participants were able to perform two tasks at the same time.
this was because one task involved the CE (true/false statements), the other involved the articulatory loop (saying random digits).
This supports the WMM because it shows the STM is a workspace consisting of several different components that can work independently of each other governed by the CE.

Question 10

what’s a piece of evidence challenging the WMM?

Answer 10

the WMM doesn’t adequately explain the roles of the CE.
critics suggest that the notion of the single executive is probably wrong and that there are in fact multiple components.
Enslinger and Damasio (1985).
studied EVR who’d had a cerebral tumour removed. he performed well on tests requiring reasoning (suggesting his CE is intact). however, he had poor decision making suggesting his CE wasn’t wholly intact.
this challenges the WMM because it suggests reasons why the CE is actually more complect than it currently represents.