Working model of memory Flashcards
Who discovered the WMM?
Baddeley and Hitch in 1974.
Name the components of WMM.
Central executive, visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop and episodic buffer
give details of the central executive
controls the slaves systems, has limited capacity, doesn’t store information, involved in problem solving and paying attention. ie focusing on teacher and ignoring distracting students.
give details on the visuospatial sketchpad.
Can temporarily store visual/spatial memories, has a limited capacity of 3 or 4 items, visual cache (stores visual data) and inner scribe (records the arrangement of objects). deals with input such as colour, shapes, light and direction. ie when someone asked you the way home you are able to imagine it in VSS
give details on the phonological loop.
deals with auditory information such as sounds, encoded acoustically, preserves the order in which information arrived. phonological store (sounds you hear) and articulatory store (inner voice maintenance rehearsal in mind) can store or repeat sounds for limited time 20-30 seconds.
give details on the episodic buffer.
added in 2000, integrates sounds and visual information. limited capacity of four chunks of information. recording of events and time sequencing.
Give research to support
Baddeley - dual tasking. found that when pmts carried out a visual and auditory task at the same time performance was no worse then when carried out separately. however when completing tasks using two visual tasks together, performance declined as the compete for the same slave system where as when doing two separate tasks there is no competition. tasks included using a pointer to track a point of light on a screen, imagine the letter F and classify the angles. performed separately there were no problems but together lead to decreased performance.
how good is Baddely’s research
High internal validity - a lab exp carried out in controlled environment with high control of extraneous variables such as IQ, hearing or visual impairments so we can establish a cause and effect relationship.
lacks external validity - high demand characteristics as a lab study, unreflective of how memory works in real life situations.
what is the application
Used in schools to maximise study ensuring the most amount of recall. when doing homework such as a reading assignment don’t listen to TV or musical the same time as it competes for the same slavesystem.
Baddeley has identified that an impaired central executive can lead to dementia. which lead to the development of dementia villages where dementia patients can live and conditions are resemble their childhood stimulating memories.
give a comparison
MSM is limited as it doesn’t detail into LTM store. tulving explanation considers episodic and semantic memories which is a better model of memory therefore WMM is limited because it doesn’t consider LTM.
give research to support the phonological loop
Baddeley study into the effects of word length on memory recall. STM can store more single syllable words then multi syllable words (long words). when given an interference task to prevent rehearsal it causes articulatory suppression so the word length effect was prevented.
give research to support using brainscans
paulescu used pET scans to record brain activity when completing visual and auditory tasks. found that two different regions of the brain were active.
