Working Memory Model

Working Memory Model

1. Visuo-spatial sketchpad

   • Visual cache
     • stores information about form and colour
   • Inner scribe
     • stores information about the physical relationships of items
   • component of the WMM that deals with the visual information and the physical relationship of items.
   • Gathercole and Baddeley
     • Found participants had difficulty simultaneously tracking a moving point of light and describing the angles on a hollow letter F, because both tasks involved using the VSS.
   • Task performed in may studies into the VSS are unusual in everyday life and so can be accused of being artificial and lacking ecological validity.
   • PET scans also show brain activation in the right hemisphere of the brain with visual tasks and activation in the right hemisphere with spatial information

2. Central Executive

   • Component of the WMM that overseas and co-ordinates the components of working memory.
   • Baddeley
     • Discovered participants found it difficult to generate lists of random numbers while simultaneously switching between pressing numbers and letter on a keyboard. Supporting the idea of CE being limited in capacity and only being able to cope with one type of information at a time.
   • Little is known about the CE. It cannot be used to explain almost any experimental results.
   • The CE is better understood as a component controlling the focus of attention rather than being used as a memory store.

3. Episodic buffer

   • component of the WMM that serves as a temporary store of integrated information from the central executive, phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad and LTM
   • Prabhakaran et al.
     • Providing evidence of an EB that allows temporary storage of integrated information.
     • Used fMRI scans to find greater right-frontal activation for combined verbal and spatial information, but greater posterior activation for non-combined information.

4. Phonological loop

   • Primary acoustic store
     • stores words heard
   • Articulatory process
     • allows sub-vocal repetition of information within the store.
   • component of the WMM that deals with auditory information
   • Trojani and Grossi
     • Case study of an individual who had brain damage affecting the functioning of his PL but not his VSS.
   • Goes against the MSM model
   • PET scans show that different brain areas are activated when doing verbal and visual tasks, which suggests that the PL and VSS are separate systems.