Working Memory Model

Working Memory Model

1. Phonological Loop

   • Role
     • Holds verbal information in an auditory form
   • Articulatory control process
     • rehearses information in the phonogical store
     • Transfers written material into auditory information to enter the store
   • Evidence for
     • Necessary for language acquisition
     • Children with Specific language impairment struggles recalling non-words e.g slimp) = therefore have a difficulty learning a new language
   • Phonological store
     • Holds words heard
     • Capacity = 1 to 2 seconds = extended with rehearsal

2. Central executive

   • Evidence for
     • Alzheimer's patients had significantly more impairment than young and old people on dual tasks that are testing different word recall = Alzheimer's patients have an impaired central executive as can't remember both sets of information
   • Role
     • Makes decisions about which issues deserve attention and which should be ignored
     • Select strategies for dealing with problems
     • can only do a limited number of things at the same time
     • Collect information from a number of different stores = senses
     • Means that we can choose which task to perform = reflex of pulling body away from burning
     • retrieves information from the LTM store
     • Makes sure that information is sent to the correct system to be stored
     • Uses slave systems as tempory sotreage so can deal with more demanding tasks
     • Limited capacity

3. Are the 'slave' systems seperate?

   • Neurophysiological Evidence
     • Williams Syndrome
       • Sufferers have normal language ability but impaired spatial and visual ability (shown by poor performance on the Corsi block tapping test = shows seperate systems as phonological loop was fine
     • Patient H.M
       • Recall of verbal information is normal , but bad impairement in spatial memory
   • Dual task experiments
     • Remember two pieces of information if the two types of information are different
       • Use a pointer to track the location of a moving light, imagine the capital letter ' F' and mentally track the edge of the letter
       • Difficulty performing tasks simultaneously when they both compete for the same 'slave' system. Can perform verbal and visual tasks simultaneously

4. Visuo-spatial sketchpad

   • Role
     • Stores visual and spatial information here
     • Can access and manipulate visual and spatial information held in LTM store
     • Limited Capacity
     • Helps us keep track of where we are in relation to other objects
   • Evidence for
     • Corsi block tapping board = tests spatial span by remembering a sequence of blocks that light up, the error frequency increased with the number in the sequence, spatial memory has a limited capacity

5. Darling (2007) found evidence that visual and spatial information was processed seperately

6. Weeknesses

   • Model was updated in 200 to include the episodic buffer = acts as a back up store which communicates with the LTM and other 'slave' systems
   • oversimplifies memory
   • Dual experiments show that if the tasks are different than more information can be held

7. Stengths

   • It is a much more plausible model than the MSM because its explains the short Term memory in terms of both tempary storage and active processing