Working Model Of Memory Flashcards
What is the working model of memory
Model of just the components of the STM
What is the central executive
-has a limited capacity of four chunks of info which are stored in the episodic buffer
-therefore tasks that require multi-tasking can be challenging as they place heavy demands on the central executive so must figure out which info to pay attention to
-allocates tasks to the slave systems, switches attention, making decisions, retrieving info from LTM
What is the Visiospatial sketchpad and what is it split into
Limited capacity temporary memory system that deals with visual and spatial information, capacity limited to 3/4 items
-split into visual cache(stores visual data) and inner scribe (stores the arrangement of objects in the visual field)
What is the phonological loop and what is it split into
Limited capacity temporary storage system that processes verbal information( acoustic encoding)
-split into phonological store (inner ear-stores the words you hear and has limited capacity of two seconds worth of what you can say) and articulatory control system(inner voice-allows maintenance rehearsal to keep sounds in working memory)
What is the episodic buffer
-hold info for chief executive (the four chunks of information)
-collects the info processed into a time sequence
-links to LTM to both retrieve information and send the episodes to be stored
Why can someone who has been driving for years talk and listen to music while driving but someone learning cannot
As practiced driving so much that it has become an automated task which places fewer attentional demands on the central executive so free to perform other tasks eg talking and listening to music by dividing resources effectively between components of the working memory. While someone learning requires all their attentional capacity for driving.
Expand on strength that the model has research support from Shallice and Warrington
-they studied a patient with amnesia and found his STM for digits was very poor when read out loud to him but much better when he was able to read the digits to himself
-suggests the phonological loop and Visio spatial sketchpad are two separate information stores located in different areas of the brain
-supports validity of existence of slave systems
H: one unique individual as case study so cannot be generalised to wider population
Expand on strength that there is empirical evidence to suggest the existence of two separate slave systems coming from brain scans
-for example Bunge Et al found that when participants were given phonological tasks only a certain area of their brain was active and when they were given a visuo spatial task only a different part of their brain was active
-objective evidence to support existence of separate slave systems
Expand on limitation that the model may oversimplify the role of the CE
-Baddeley wrote that the central executive is the most important component of the model yet is the least understood as the model only outlines the attention role it plays
-suggests the model may be incomplete and truly tell us very little about the role of the central executive in the short term memory
Expand on strength that the model is supported by research into dual task performance
-baddeley found participants performed worse when doing two dual visual tasks than one verbal and one visual task, suggesting that multitasking of visuospatial sketchpad meant performance decreased as the demands places on the sketchpad exceeded its limited capacity
-supports the capacity of the stores that the model outlines and that there must be a separate store that processes visual information
