Evaluate The Working Model Of Memory

The working model of memory is a model of short term memory which was developed from experimentation and observation by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974. They developed this as they didn't’t believe that short-term memory was as simple as being only one store. The WMM consists of 3 main stores, the central executive, the phonological loop and visuo-spatial sketchpad. The central executive can store information for a brief period of time and has limited capacity, it is needed to perform a number of tasks such as focus and switch attentions, co-ordinate the two sub-systems and connect working memory with LTM. The central executive unit is seen as the most important aspect of the model, yet it is the area we know least about as we haven’t yet proved its existence.
The visuo-spatial sketchpad also has limited capacity, and is divided into two components, the visual component which deals with objects and features such as shape and colour and the spatial component which deals with locations etc and it involves tasks such as planning routes and remembering where things are placed in your room. The model was later adapted in 2000 to include the episodic buffer; this was added after the model failed to explain the results of some experiments. The episodic buffer acts as a sort of backup store which works with both the long term memory and the various components of the working