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The Working Model of Memory - The Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad and The Episodic…
The Working Model of Memory - The Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad and The Episodic Buffer
The Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad
Handles non phonological information and is a temporary store for visual and spatial items and the relationship between them
Helps individuals to navigate around and interact with their physical environment , with information being encoded and rehearsed through the use of mental pictures
Logie (1995) suggests sub-dividing the store into a visual cache , which stores visual material about form and colour and an inner scribe , which handles spatial relationships and rehearses and transfers information in the visual cache to the CE
Gathercole and Baddeley (1993) found participants had difficulty simultaneously tracking a moving point of light and describing the angles on a hollow letter F , because both tasks involved using VSS. Other participants had little difficulty in tracking the light and performing a simultaneous verbal task , as both tasks involve using the VSS and the PL , indicating the VSS to be separate slave system
Klauer and Zhao (2004) reported more interference between two visual tasks than between a visual and a spatial task , implying the existence of a separate visual cache and inner scribe
The Visuo Spatial Sketchpad Evaluation
As well as showing the PL and the VSS to be located in different brain areas , PET scans also show brain activation in the left hemisphere of the brain with visual tasks and activation in the right hemisphere with spatial information , which further supports the idea of dividing the VSS into separate VC and IS
Studies of the VSS and the PL often feature a dual task technique , where participants have to perform two simultaneous activities .However the actual tasks performed are often not ones encountered much in everyday life and so such studies can be accused of being artificial and lacking in mundane realism
The episodic buffer
Baddeley (2000) added a third slave system as the model needs a general store to operate properly
The PL and the VSS deal with the processing and temporary storage of specific types of information , but have limited capacity and the CE has no storage capacity , and so cannot contain items relating to visual and acoustic properties
Therefore the EB was introduced to explain how it is possible to temporarily store information combined together from the CE , the PL , the VSS and the LTM
Prabhakaran (2000) used fMRI scans to find greater right frontal brain activation for combined verbal and spatial information , bur greater posterior activation for non combined information , providing biological evidence of an EB that allows temporary storage of integrated information
Alkhalifa (2009) reported on a patient with severely impaired LTM who demonstrated STM capacity of up to 25 prose items , far exceeding the capacity of both the PL and the VSS . This suggests the existence of an EB , which holds items in working memory until they are recalled
