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The Working Model of Memory - The Central Executive and The Phonological…
The Working Model of Memory - The Central Executive and The Phonological Loop
Baddeley and Hitch (1974) questioned the existence of a single STM store and said that it was more complex
They saw STM as an active store , holding several pieces of information while they are being worked on
Cohen (1990) described working memory as 'the focus of consciousness - it holds information consciously thought about now"
The working memory model had initially three components , at the head of the model is the central executive , which overseas 2 slave systems , the visuospatial sketchpad and the phonological loop. The episodic buffer was added in 2000 to address shortcomings of the model
The central executive
Acts as a filter to determine which information received by the sense organs is attended to
Processes information in all sensory forms , directs information to the models slave systems and collects responses
Limited in capacity and can only effectively cope with one strand of information at a time
It attains a balance between tasks when attention needs to be divided between them . It also permits us to switch attention between different inputs of information
Baddeley (1996) discovered that participants found it difficult to generate lists of random numbers while simultaneously switching between pressing numbers and letters on a keyboard , suggesting that the 2 tasks were competing for CE attention. This supports the idea that the CE is limited in capacity and can only cope with one strand of information at a time
Evaluation of the central executive
It isn't clear how it works or what it does .This vagueness means that it can be used to explain almost any experimental findings . If 2 tasks cannot be performed together the the two processing components are seen as conflicting , or it is argued that the two tasks exceed the central executives capacity . If two tasks can be done simultaneously its argued they don't exceed the available resources , in essence a circular argument (an argument that continually proves itself)
The CE is probably better understood as a component controlling the focus of attention rather than being a memory store , unlike the PL and the VSS , which are specialised memory stores
The phonological loop
Deals with auditory information and the order of information
Has a capacity of the amount of information which can be spoken out loud in about 2 seconds
As its mainly an acoustic store , confusions occur with similar sounding words
Baddeley (1986) divided the PL into two sub parts : the primary acoustic store (PAS) and the articulatory process (AP)
The PAS stores words recently heard while the AP keeps information in the PL through sub-vocal repetition of information and is linked to speech production
Trojani and Grossi (1995) reported a case study of SC , who had bran damage affecting the functioning of his PL but not his VSS , suggesting the PL to be a separate system
Baddeley (1975) reported on the word length effect , where participants recalled more short words in serial order than longer words , supporting the idea that capacity of the PL is set by how long it takes to say words , rather than the actual number of words
Evaluation of the phonological loop
PET scans show that different brain areas are activated when doing verbal and visual tasks , which suggests that the PL and the visuo-spatial sketchpad are separate systems , reflected in the biology of the brain
The PL is strongly associated with the evolution of human vocal language , with the development of the slave system seen as producing a significant increase in the short term ability to remember vocalisations. This then helped the learning of more complex language abilities , such as grammar and expressing meaning
