Very limited capacity and can be overloaded by too much information and too many tasks. The central executive therefore allocates work to the other stores to free up its own processing capacity

Controls our attention, overseas memory tasks and allocates work to the other parts (slave system) as well as controlling the flow of information to and from the LTM

Stores and processes speech based sounds for a short period of time

The storage system is the phonological store which allows acoustically coded items to be passively stores for a brief period

The processing system is the articulatory control system which allows repetition of sounds in the phonological store to prevent rapid decay of the information

Baddeley described the articulatory control system as a 'tape loop of a tape recorder' with a two second duration

The articulatory control system also codes visual information to verbal information

Stores visual and spatial information (information about physical arrangements of something) for a short duration (decay is rapid without rehearsal)

The storage system is the visual cache (stores information about shape and form)

The processing system is the inner scribe (which processes information about position in space)

Coding may be visual, spatial and even kinaesthetic (movement)