Working Memory Model

Working Memory Model

1. Centeral executive

   • The centeral executive is the part of the brain that directs all the information to different parts of the STM
     • The centeral executive will direct the information to the visual spatial sketchpad or the phonological loop

2. Phonological loop

   • The phonological consisit of the two parts the articulatory process and the phonological store
     • Articulatory process
       • This is used to rehearse and store verbal information from the phological store linked to speech production.
     • Phonological Store
       • The phonological store holds information in speech based forms e.g. words for 1-2 seconds.

3. Visual spatial sketchpad

   • 'the visual cache'
     • Stores visual information about form and colour
   • 'inner scribe'
     • This handles spatial relationships

4. Episodic Buffer

   • this intergates information from the centeral executive, the phonological loop, the visual-spatial sketchpad and long term memory. It has a limited capacity and it's a general stores for the WMM.

5. Evidence for the WMM

   • Hitch and Baddley
     • They gave participants two task.. In one condition p's had a task that involved the centeral executive, this was a sentence verification task and another task that involved the articulatory loop.
       • In the second conditions p's had the original task of sentence verification as well as a further task that involved both the central executive and the articulatory loop.
         • They found that it's harder to do two task involving the same store than two task that involve different stores.
   • Evidence for separate components
     • The case of KF supports the concept of the phonological loop being a separate component of memory.
       • Shallice and Warrington found that his STM was affected but not his LTM. In particular KF had difficulties with forgetting auditory information more than forgetting visual images.
   • Central Executive Research
     • Bunge et al used evidence from FMRI scans to show that there is more brain activation during a dual-task compared with a single task activity. In the dual task p's had to both read a sentence and recall the final word. In the single task p's simply read a sentence.
       • This suggest that if you increase the demands of attention then this is reflected in actual brain activity.
   • Phonological loop research
     • Baddley reported on the word length effect where p's recalled more short words in serial order than longer words suggesting capacity of the PL is set by how long it takes to say words rather than how many words they have to remember