THE WORKING MEMORY MODEL

THE WORKING MEMORY MODEL

1. 1. THE CENTRAL EXECUTIVE

   • Main component of the WMM. It decides what we pay attention too
   • Modality free - capable of reading information from all of the senses
   • THE BOSS - it has control over all 3 of the slave systems
   • No storage capacity and it can only pay attention to a limited number of stimuli

2. 2. THE PHONOLOGICAL LOOP

   • Deals with auditory information. Plays a key role in acquisition of volcabulary
   • SPLIT INTO 2 PARTS
     • THE PHONOLOGICAL STORE
       • Referred to as the 'inner ear' as it holds speech based information such as words we hear for 1-2 seconds
     • THE ARTICULATORY CONTROL PROCESS
       • Silently repeats the words from the PS on a loop to prevent them from decaying

3. 3. THE VISUO-SPATIAL SKETCHPAD

   • Stores and manipulates visual information from the eyes or LTM. It can be used as a temporary storage and manipulation of spatial (relationship between things) and visual information
   • 2 COMPONENTS
     • 1. THE VISUAL CACHE
       • Stores information about form and colour
     • 2. THE INNER SCRIBE
       • Deals with spatial and movement information

4. 4. THE EPISODIC BUFFER

   • Dedicated to integrating or binding information from the LTM and the different slave systems into a single unit of information
     • The episodic buffer joins this information together into a memory episode
   • Provides information about time and order
   • Limited capacity

5. EVALUATION

   • 1. SUPPORT FOR THE PHONOLOGICAL STORE
     • Paulsea monitored blood flow in participants brains using a PET scan. He asked to store a series of letters or mentally rehearse the sounds of the letters. He found that there were different patterns of blood flow for the two tasks
       • This means that there must be a subdivision in the phonological loop
   • 2. EXPERIMETAL EVIDENCE
     • Baddeley conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to perform two tasks at the same time
       • DIGIT SPAN TASK: Participants were required to simply repeat a list of numbers. VERBAL.
       • REASONING TASK: Participants were required to answer true or false to various questions
       • He found that participants managed to do both tasks quite well as each used a different component in the WMM
         • This shows that STM is made up of more than just one store
   • 3. BRAIN DAMAGED PATIENTS LEND SUPPORT: Shallice and Warrington
     • Studied brains that were in an accident. Their verbal memory was poor, his memory for visual information was unaffected
       • Increases validity of WMM as it shows that there are 2 different stores; Visuospatial and verbal store
   • 4. MAIN COMPONENT IS VERY VAGUE
     • Central executive is the most important store but its the one we know least about
       • The notion is wrong and there are probably several components within the CE
         • We now lack trust in the WMM as it is far too simplistic

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