Outline And Evaluate The Working Memory Model Essay

Outline and evaluate the working memory model:

The working memory model was proposed by Baddeley and Hitch 1974 in response to criticism of the multi store model. They did not think that short term memory was a single unitary store, as the multi-store model of memory had suggested. In contrast, they believed that short term memory consisted of several components, an alliance of several temporary systems working together. The central executive directs attention to certain information, and essentially shares out the incoming sensory information, controlling the flow of information to and from the slave systems. It also has a very limited capacity, which is shown in the study by Bunge et al (2000), where an fMRI was used to observe what areas

There is lots of evidence for this model. For example, Baddeley and Hitch asked participants to perform a dual task technique where they had to repeat a list of numbers and a verbal reasoning task which required them to answer true or false to various questions. They found that the larger the amount of numbers in the tasks, participants took longer to answer the reasoning questions, but only fractions of a second longer. Also they did not make any more errors in the verbal reasoning tasks as the number of digits increased. Therefore, the verbal reasoning task made use of the central executive and the digit span task used the phonological loop, showing that there are is more than one system in short term memory, and this allows different tasks to be performed at once. Also, evidence from brain damaged patients supports the working memory mode. In the KF Case Study, KF’s short term memory was damaged in a motorcycle accident, however only verbal information was effected - his memory for visual information was largely unaffected. Therefore there must be separate STM components for visual information (VSS) and verbal information (phonological