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The Working Memory Model, EVALUATION, STUDIES - Coggle Diagram
The Working Memory Model
Central Executive
- acts like attention
- limited capacity
- determines how resources (slave systems) are allocated
- involved with reasoning & decision making tasks
- Baddeley (1986) - metaphor - 'company boss'
- modality free (not coded by sense)
Baddeley & Hitch (1974)
- focused on STM
- LTM more passive store that holds previously
learned material for use by STM when needed
-
Episodic Buffer
- model needed more general store
- extra storage system (limited capacity of 4 chunks)
- integrates info from all areas
- modality free
-
EVALUATION
Clinical Evidence
!STRENGTH!
- Shallice & Warrington's (1970) case study of patient KF
- after brain injury, KF had poor STM ability for auditory info
- but could process visual info normally
- e.g. immediate recall of letters/digits was better when he read them (visual) than when they were read to him (acoustic)
- KF's phonological loop was damaged but visuo-spatial sketchpad was intact
- finding strongly supports existence of separate visual & acoustic memory stores
HOWEVER
- unclear whether KF had other cognitive impairments which may have affected his performance on memory tasks
- e.g. injury caused by motorcycle accident - trauma involved may have affected his cognitive performance
- this challenges evidence that comes from clinical studoes of people with brain injuries that may have affected many different systems
Dual-task Performance
!STRENGTH!
- studies of DTP support separate existence of visuo-spatial sketchpad
- Baddeley et al (1975) participants carried out visual & verbal task at same time (DT) - performance on each was similar to when carried out tasks seperately
- but when both tasks where visual/verbal - performance declined substantially
- because both visual tasks for the same subsystem (VSS), whereas there is no competition when performing verbal & visual task together
- shows there must be a separate subsystem (VSS) that processes visual input & one for verbal processing (PL)
-
STUDIES
Baddeley & Hitch (1976)
- gave participants 2 tasks to perform simultaneously
- asked to say 'the the the' (involves articulatory loop)
- asked to say random digits ) involves central executive & articulatory loop)
Results
- true/false task was slower when given 2nd task involving central executive & articulatory loop
Conclusions
- completing 2 tasks that involve same component causes difficulty
- supports central executive & WMM
Bunge et al (2000)
- used fMRI to see which parts of brain were most active when participants were doing a verbal & visual task
- same brain ares (pre-frontal cortex) were active in either dual & single task conditions
- but there was significantly more activation in dual task condition