Working memory model Flashcards
(13 cards)
Who proposed the WMM?
Baddeley and Hitch
What are the components of the WMM?
- Central executive
- Phonological loop
- Episodic buffer
- Visuospatial sketchpad
Why did they think that the STM was a number of different stores?
- If you do two things at the same time (dual task) and they are both visual, you preform less well than if you do them separately
- If you do two things at the same where one is visual and one is auditory, then there is no interference and you preform normally as you would do for them separately
What is the central executive?
- Directs attention to tasks (decides what working memory pays attention to)
- Responsible for monitoring coordinating and combining the operation of the slave systems
- Gives priority to particular activities
- Has limited capacity
What is the phonological loop?
- Deals with auditory information
- Made up of the phonological store and the articulatory control system
- Phonological store acts as the inner ear
- Articulatory control control system acts as inner voice
How does the phonological store, Store memory?
spoken words enter store directly for 1 to 2 seconds before it fades
How does the articulatory control system store memory?
visually presented words must be converted into a spoken code before entering the phonological store
What is the episodic buffer?
- Component has only recently been added to the model it is more of a general store
- A temporary capacity store binding verbal and spatial info allowing a subsystem interaction
- interacts between the working memory and long term memory
What is the visuospatial sketchpad?
- Deals temporarily with visual and spatial information (acts as an inner eye)
- Only time LTM is used is when it needs to retrieve images. (VS communicates with LTM)
A03 - STRENGTH - Research evidence for central executive
- Hitch and Baddeley: Dual task performance
- During the dual task performance ppts were able to preform two tasks at the same time
- This was because one of the tasks involved the CE (true/false statements), the other involved the articulatory loop (saying random digits)
- STM is work space consisting of several different components that can work independently of each other governed by the CE
A03 - STRENGTH - Research support for phonological loop
- Baddeley et al: Word length effect
- Ppts remembered lists of short words better than long words
- This is because short words can be processed faster before the memory trace decays (within 2 seconds) than longer words. Longer words cannot fit on the phonological loop.
- Suggests that the phonological store has a limited capacity
A03 - STRENGTH - Research support for Visuospatial sketchpad
- Performance on visual and verbal processing tasks
- Ppts perform better when a visual processing task and verbal processing task can be performed at the same time.
- This is because it is more difficult to perform two visual tasks or two verbal tasks at the same time because they interfere with each other and performance is reduce.
- Suggests that working memory uses two different systems for dealing with visual and verbal information
- Supports the view that phonological loop and sketchpad are separate systems within working memory.
A03 - What are the reasons why the WMM may not adequately explain the role of the CE?
- Some psychologists think its too vague.
- Think CE is wrong and there are several components
- Eslinger and Damasio studied EVR who had a cerebral tumour removed
- He performed well on tests requiring reasoning tasks suggesting that his CE is intact
- However, he had poor decision making skills, suggesting his CE was not wholly intact.
- Therefore CE is probably more complex than what B+H offer
