Working Memory Model Essay

Baddeley and Hitch (1974) criticised the multi-store model for being a very simplistic view of memory. They saw short term memory as a store that had many individual sections inside it. This was supported by patient KF who had epilepsy, the doctor wanted to try and remedy this by removing his hippocampus. This surgery was done, however instead of fixing his epilepsy, it damaged his short term memory, yet he still had his long term memory intact. In the multi-store model it states that in order to have long term memory, one needs to have gone through the several stores, such as the sensory memory store, the short term memory and then by adding meaning and rehearsal, into the long term memory store. Seen as patient KF could still encode long term memory, it is obvious that he still had part of his short term memory that was intact, proposing the idea that there was in fact many sections to the short term memory. Therefore, Baddeley and Hitch proposed the working memory model. The first key component of the working memory model is the central executive; this is like the boss of the working memory model. It controls all of the other slave systems in it, and orders them to do what they do, when they need to do it. Put simply, it directs attention to particular tasks, and how to allocate resources. One study to support this is Gathercole and Baddeley (1993) study on the Visio-spacial sketch pad. This is a dual task study, which involved asking participants to follow a moving point of light, whilst describing the angles of the hollow angle 'F '. This was found to be difficult because both activities are competing from the same slave system. They were then asked to perform a verbal task whilst following light (using the phonological loop). These are process from two different slave systems, and so they are not competing for the resource. This resulted in this task being performed much better. The second key component of the working memory model is the phonological loop