Psychology: Memory - The working memory model

Baddeley and Hitch (1974) WMM

Central executive (CE)

Has a supervisor role, it monitors incoming data and gives subsystems their tasks

• Coding = flexible

• Capacity = very limited

Phonological loop (PL)

Deals with sound and preserves the order in which it arrived. Subdivided into:

• Phonological store: holds the words you hear

• Articulatory process: repeats the words in your head to keep them in memory

Visio-spatial sketchpad (VSS)

• Stores what you see and where things are

• Used when picturing things in your mind e.g where you bed is in your room

• Visual cache: stores images and visual info

• Inner scribe: keeps track of where things are and how theyre arranged

Episodic buffer (EB)

• Added in 2000

• A temporary store that brings together info from other parts of memory

• Combines visual, spatial and verbal info

• Keeps track of order of events

• Links working memory to LTM

Strength - support from clinical evidence

• Shalice and Warrington (1970) patient KF brain injury

• KF’s STM for auditory info was poor but could process visual info normal

• Supports the WMM view of a seperate visual and acoustic memory store

• However, KF may have other impairments causing poor auditory performance

Strength - dual task performance studies support the VSS

• Baddeley et al. pps found it harder to carry out two visual tasks at the same time than do a verbal and visual task

• Due to both visual tasks competing for the same subsystem (VSS)

• Therefore there must be a separate subsystem that processes visual input and verbal processes

Limitation - lack of clarity of CE

• Baddeley said CE was most important but least understood

• There must be more to CE than just being ‘attention’

• Therefore CE is an unsatisfactory component, this challenges the integrity of the model