The working memory model

Baddeley and Hitch 1974 -  Short term only

Articulary slave system, encodes acoustic data, The articulary loop acts as an inner voice for rehearsal whereas the phonological store acts as the inner ear.

Acts as the inner eye. Responsible for visuo-spatial enocoding. Visual cache produces memory of an image whereas the inner scribe in the rehearsal mechanism

Allocates attention to its slave systems, co-ordinates activity but has a limited capacity

Central Executive.

Baddeley 1996Asked participants to put together random strings of numbers on a keyboard, not letting a pattern emerge in 3 different conditions.Rehearsing the alphabetcounting from 1changing between numbers and letters (A1,B2)Digit strings became less random in condition 3. This is because both of these tasks were using the central executive simultaneously.

Phonological Store.

Baddeley et al (1975)Testing the role of rehearsal in the phonological loop. 2 conditions where participants were presented with words listed and asked them to recall them by writing them down in order. Words were either:Short, monosyllabicLonger, polysyllabicThey found that short words are easier to remember than long words, suggesting the idea of 'word length effect' The capacity of the loop is determined by the length of the time it takes to say the words rather than the amount of items on the list.

Visuo-spatial Sketchpad.

Baddeley et al 1973Participants were required to follow a sport of light with a pointer as it moved round a circular path whilst carrying out a visual imagery task of imagining block capitals such as the letter F. Participants were asked to hold the image and then starting at the bottom-left corner to respond to each angle as 'Yes' if it included the bottom or top line of the letter and 'No' if it did not.Participants had a high degree of difficulty in tracking the sport of light and accurately classifying the corners.People will find it difficult to do 2 tasks involving the visuo-spatial sketchpad simultaneously.

Evaluation.

The case study of KF supports the working memory model. KF suffered brain damage after a motorbike incident that damaged his short term memory. His impairment was mainly for verbal information, his memory for visual information was largely unaffected. This supports the model's idea of seperate stores for visual and verbal information, and also supports the idea of parallel processing.

The working memory model offers a much more detailed explanation about the processes involved in the short term memory. This makes it superior to the multi store model in that aspect, with research from dual task techniques to support claims.

The working memory model is based upon case studies such as KF that have brain damage. These are rare and unique cases that offer no before and after comparison, therefore the model appears to lack generalisability to the whole population.

The description of the central executive is vague, little research has been done to understand the capacity of it, and its actual function. Some say it is nothing more than the attention aspect of the multi store model. This means it si difficult to falsify, which reduces the validity of the model.

Introduction

Central executive

Phonological store

Visuo-spatial sketchpad

Evaluation