Outline and Evaluate the Working Memory Model

In 1974 the researchers Baddeley and Hitch argued that the picture of short-term memory (STM) provided by the Multi-Store Model was far too simple. Following the Multi-Store Model, it is believed that STM holds limited amounts of information for short periods of time with relatively little processing, it is believed to be a unitary store. This means that due to its single store it has no subsystems, unlike the Working Memory Model which has many subsystems. This proves that the Working Memory is not a unitary store. Working Memory is STM. In contrast to the Multi-Store Model, where all the information goes to one single store (Unitary store), there are different systems for the different types of information. Working Memory consists of the Central Executive, The Visuo-Spatial Sketch Pad, The Episodic Buffer and the Phonological Loop. These all link back into the Long-Term Memory (LTM). The Central Executive drives the subsidiary system. It is the main component of the Working Memory Model and its main role is to direct attention to particular tasks, determining at any time how ‘resources’ are allocated to tasks. The resources described are the three subsidiary systems, also known as the three slave systems. Although directing these three subsidiary systems it has a very limited capacity and therefore cannot attend to too many things at once although if any of the systems become overworked it will help with some of the workload. To prove that the Central Executive was the driver behind the subsidiary systems, evidence was needed, Bunge et al (2000) found evidence for the Central Executive and used FMRI scans to see which part of the brain were most active when participants were tasked with reading a sentence and recalling the final word in each sentence. He believed that activity in the Central Executive should be increased when an individual has to perform two tasks simultaneously (dual-task) rather than one after the other (single-task). His results from his