Baddeley and Hitch proposed the Working Memory Model (WMM) and supported their findings through conducting experiments which proved that the participants couldn’t perform two tasks if they were competing for the use of the same section of the WMM. So, explains that we can perform two different tasks at once as long as they are dissimilar. It focuses on the short term memory (STM). It is made of 3 separate parts. The Central Executive is the main component in the model; it decides what to pay attention to as it has limited duration and capacity and decides where these pieces of information should go. From the Central Executive there are two slave systems. One is the Phonological Loop which contains phonological store or the “inner ear” and the Articulatory Control which is the “inner voice” The Phonological Store processes auditory information. Then there is the Visuo-Spatial Sketch Pad which is the “inner eye” and it deals with special and visual information.
A strength of the WMM is that the dual task experiment that supports it was done in a lab so it is reliable as it tests exactly what it is supposed to test since you can control confounding variables. However because of this it can be argued that it is low in ecological validity. Another downfall of this experiment is that it was based on maths and so relies on the participants’ maths ability so it could be argued that if a participant was bad at maths then that could be the reason they performed poorly.
Another good thing about the WMM is that it is useful and has practical applications for example it can be used in education, helping teachers understand how students learn and being able to take advantage of this.
Although it explains the STM in depth, it doesn’t consider long term memory and there is little known about the most important section of the model, the Central Executive which is the most important part of the model as it decides where attention should be focused and the capacity of this...