The Working Memory Model Essay

Badeley & Hitch (1974) developed the Working Memory Model (WMM) as a more accurate alternative model of the Short Term Memory (STM) after discovering a number of limitations with Atkinson & Shiffrin’s (1968) Multi-Store Model (MSM) concerning the simplicity of the STM. The multi-store model states that data in the STM has a short duration Baddeley & Hitch agreed with this from research evidence but they found the stores processing system to be much more complex, containing many subsystems that are connected to send information back and forth to each other, all with the same short capacity duration as in the MSM.

The WMM is split into 4 subsystems; each different system has a role for the different types of information. The first subsystem is the Central Executive which is the key component to the model and is responsible for allocating the right information to the right slave system; it is also used when we deal with cognitive tasks such as problem solving and decides what the rest of the WMM pays attention to by giving attention and priority to particular tasks. The Visio-Spatial Sketchpad (inner eye) is one of the slave system responsible for our visual and special information hence the name. All of the visual information such as what we noticeably see is sent here from the central executive.

The Phonological Loop, also known as the inner ear, is the second slave system, responsible for auditory and language information such as preserving word order when we read. This system is subdivided into 2 sub-components which information constantly travels…