The Working Memory Model was first proposed by Baddeley and Hitch in They Carried out an investigation to investigate whether there are different components in STM They gave participants 2 tasks; a rehearsal task and a verbal reasoning task They found that participants could perform well on both tasks at the same time This supported the idea of independent components of STM

This is the main component of STM Controls the other ‘slave’ systems Involved in decision making and problem solving Can process any type of information Directs attention to particular tasks

Deals with acoustic/auditory and verbal information Has 2 components Articulatory Control System - Used to rehearse and store verbal information from the phonological store Phonological Store – Holds information in words that you hear for a brief period of time As with all short term memory it has a limited capacity

Temporary store used for visual and spatial information Responsible for producing for producing and manipulating mental images Limited capacity

Added to the working memory model by Baddeley in 2000 Accounts for things that use both visual and auditory information General storage system Integrates information from STM and LTM to for ‘episodes’ Limited capacity

Bunge et al (2000) Made PT’s perform either 1 task or 2 tasks Scanned their brains whilst performing the tasks Found in both conditions brain areas were active But in condition 2, more brain areas were active Shows different components in different brain areas and that they work independently There are also other studies supporting this research Baddeley and Hitch

Strengths There is a good amount of supporting research to back up these claims There is a continuing development of the model The WMM is a good explanation on how STM works Weaknesses Most research is on the slave components There is evidence suggesting the Central executive is not one component It is not very clear on how the components interact