OUTLINE AND EVALUATE THE WORKING MEMORY MODEL (paper 1)
The working memory model is a development on the MSM after criticisms of being over
simplistic, it explains the STM as an active processor that consists of a central executive and
3 slave systems: the phonological loop, the episodic buffer and the visuo-spatial sketchpad.
The CE directs attention to a particular task and decides which slave system to send it to.
The phonological loop is a 2 second loop which consists of the phonological store (inner ear)
and the articulatory process (inner voice). The visuo-spatial sketchpad consists of the visual
cache (visual items) and the inner scribe (spatial relations). All the stores make links with
LTM showing there’s more than one way to transfer memories from STM to LTM.
Evidence to support the WMM comes from KF who, could recall verbal information but not
visual information immediately after its presentation, which supports the WMM’s claim that
separate stores manage different tasks like the phonological and visual memories. However,
KF is a brain damage study and so due to there being no records from before the brain
damage, it makes it hard to establish cause and effect.
Another piece of evidence to support the WMM comes from Baddeley’s dual task
experiment which found pps were slower when doing spatial (describe angles of the letter F)
and visual (following a light) tasks at the same time because they involve the same store.
However, this study lacks mundane realism because these tasks don’t represent real life
visual and spatial elements and so the findings can’t be generalised.
A final piece of evidence to support the WMM is that it provides an explanation for parallel
processing where processes involved in a cognitive task occur at once, unlike Atkinson and
Shiffrin’s MSM. However, despite providing more detail of STM than the MSM, the WMM
has also been criticized for being too simplistic and vague as it is unclear what the central
executive is, or its exact role in attention and so it makes the model reductionist.
The working memory model is a development on the MSM after criticisms of being over
simplistic, it explains the STM as an active processor that consists of a central executive and
3 slave systems: the phonological loop, the episodic buffer and the visuo-spatial sketchpad.
The CE directs attention to a particular task and decides which slave system to send it to.
The phonological loop is a 2 second loop which consists of the phonological store (inner ear)
and the articulatory process (inner voice). The visuo-spatial sketchpad consists of the visual
cache (visual items) and the inner scribe (spatial relations). All the stores make links with
LTM showing there’s more than one way to transfer memories from STM to LTM.
Evidence to support the WMM comes from KF who, could recall verbal information but not
visual information immediately after its presentation, which supports the WMM’s claim that
separate stores manage different tasks like the phonological and visual memories. However,
KF is a brain damage study and so due to there being no records from before the brain
damage, it makes it hard to establish cause and effect.
Another piece of evidence to support the WMM comes from Baddeley’s dual task
experiment which found pps were slower when doing spatial (describe angles of the letter F)
and visual (following a light) tasks at the same time because they involve the same store.
However, this study lacks mundane realism because these tasks don’t represent real life
visual and spatial elements and so the findings can’t be generalised.
A final piece of evidence to support the WMM is that it provides an explanation for parallel
processing where processes involved in a cognitive task occur at once, unlike Atkinson and
Shiffrin’s MSM. However, despite providing more detail of STM than the MSM, the WMM
has also been criticized for being too simplistic and vague as it is unclear what the central
executive is, or its exact role in attention and so it makes the model reductionist.
