Evidence and Evaluation of WMM

Capacity of the ARTICULATORY LOOP Baddeley et al (1975) showed that people involved in a recall task could immediately recall as many words as they could read out in 2 seconds, but no more. The loop therefore works like a continuous cassette loop: what is remembered depends on how long it takes to read it out loud, and not by the number of items.

Concurrent Verbalisation Tasks If you repeatedly say a word out loud, you are occupying your articulatory loop so that it can’t be used to hold other info. The idea of performing two verbal tasks at the same time is called concurrent verbalisation. Read the text on the next slide while repeating the words ‘cognitive psychology’ out loud

Repeat ‘Cognitive Psychology’ Council planners are opening up the debate on the future of every square inch of Wigan borough…and they want to hear from you. Residents will shortly be getting a leaflet from the council called Issues and Options for the Future. It looks at where development can take place over the next few years, and how this will help make communities into places where people want to live, work and spend their leisure time.

Articulatory Suppression You may not have been able to remember very much of the text, because your articulatory loop was being used to repeat out loud. This is called articulatory suppression.

Inclusion of the Primary Acoustic Store This was added to the model in 1982 when it was found that information that is presented acoustically is not affected by articulatory suppression. This is in contrast with the task you just undertook.

Evaluation of Working Memory WMM is limited in the fact that it only considers the STM and recently activated LTM. However it is a strength that it points out just how closely linked these 2 elements of memory are.

Problem with the Central Executive Baddeley (1996) suggests that it has 4 components: it can co-ordinate performance on 2 separate tasks, allocate attention, switch retrieval strategies, and provide processing capacity available to be used by any of the slave systems. However he goes on to say…….

It is yet to be established whether it is more appropriate to see the central executive as a unified system with multiple functions, or as a set of independent though interacting control processes.

Advantages of WMM The main advantage is how it portrays memory as an active process, and not merely a series of passive stores. Cognitive psychologists also find it useful to see attention and memory as part of the same system, since we tend to use the two processes together. The central executive is an attentional system.

P.E.T Scans WMM ties in with P.E.T scan research. Activity in the brain corresponds with the four systems the model proposes.

PET Scans Below Central Executive Primary Acoustic Store Visuo-spatial scratch pad Articulatory loop

Practical Applications If children with normal intelligence are having difficulties learning to read, and they also have trouble in recognising rhyme, it suggests a problem with their articulatory loop. If we can understand the systems better then we can help these children to change their processing.