In 1968 Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin proposed a model of memory (Attkinson&Shiffrin, 1968) that consisted of three separate units. Those were sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. According to the model, the information that was received from the environmental input was flowing through a consistent system. Attkinson stated that functioning of the memory in general is impossible unless all of the three components are present and are functioning well. The role of the short-term memory was to serve as a transition station for the information to pass to the long-term memory. Short-term memory was supposed to provide ways to control and enhance information, via rehearsal …show more content…
The suggestion was that there is not a single operating system for storing the short-term information, but multiple ones. Allan Baddeley and Graham Hitch (1974) conducted an experiment that was testing the short-term memory’s ability to store information from two different sensual channels. The participants were asked to perform a task that required them to store in the short-term memory information from both visual and auditory sources. If there was a single storage component for the short-term memory, the task would have been drastic for the participants. However, the performance was not impaired. It took participants slightly longer to respond, but there were no errors made. These results led to a contradicting argument from Baddeley and Hitch that made the concept of multi-store model evolve to a whole different …show more content…
First of all, the main function of working memory according to Baddeley-Hitch model is not being a midpoint between sensory input and long-term memory, but to empower the full complexity of cognitive abilities that are required to integrate, manipulate and coordinate the mentally represented information. Second of all, in the newly created model by Baddeley-Hitch, there is the central executive part of the working memory. Its’ role is to manipulate the intake and removal of information from short-term storage and two storage buffers. The final distinction between the two is that the Baddeley-Hitch model implies existence of two separate short-term storage buffers, one responsible for verbal information (phonological loop), and the other one responsible for the visuospatial information (visuospatial scratchpad). These three integral parts interact together, providing a workspace for the cognitive abilities to encode, retrieve and store information. Baddeley and Hitch provided a lot of theoretical information that was based on experiments about all the parts of the working memory. According to them, the working memory storage is capable of holding in the short-term storage not only information from two different sources (visual and auditory, since there are two different buffers responsible for each of them), but even two separate queues of information coming from the same source. For instance, when attending a