The Working Memory Model: Components

The central executive has limited capacity but can process information from any sense.

It carries out a wide range of control processes including switching attention between two tasks and retrieving information from LTM.

It is supported by two slave systems which it allocates tasks to.

The phonological loop deals with auditory and verbal information and preserves the order of information.

The visuo-spatial sketchpad deals with visual and spatial tasks e.g. planning a journey, remembering a face or recalling the order of shops on your local highstreet.

Baddeley added the episodic buffer to the model because it lacked a general store.

The funtion of the episodic buffer is to integrate information from the central executive, the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketch pad to form LTM.