preview

Essay on Baddeley and Hitch’s Working Memory Model

Good Essays
Open Document

This essay addresses the working memory model which was proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974 in Smith & Kosslyn, 2007) as a response to Atkinson and Shiffrins (1968 in Smith, 2007) multi-store model. According to Baddely and Hitch the multi-store model failed to explain most of the complexities of the human memory and viewed it as being too simplistic. They argued that the short term memory store must have more components rather it being a single inflexible store as suggested previously by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). The working memory model is therefore an enhancement of the multi store model. According to Baddeley and Hitch working memory is a limited- capacity system that stores and processes information.
According to Baddeley and …show more content…

This is interpreted as because the capacity of the phonological loop is limited in time (in Smith, 2007).
Further evidence for the existence of the phonological loop comes from Conrads and Hulls (1975 in Passer, 2009) experiment in which they examined the effect of phonological similarity. They found that serial recall in a list of similar sounding words tended to yield poorer results with participants finding it difficult to remember compared to words that sounded different. It has also been found that recall in semantically similar words tended to have little or no effect, supporting the idea that verbal information is transferred in a phonological manner in working memory. In addition, Vallar and Papagno (1995 in Smith, 2007) found that the phonological store in brain damaged patients were dysfunctional.
Moreover, Hardyk and Petrinovich (1970 in Parkin, 1993) found the articulatory loop to be crucial when being presented with complex information. In their study they measured participants throat muscle and forearm muscle activity although some may argue that this was not a good technique to carry out. Their findings led to them conclude that when participants were presented with complex material their articulatory loop would come in to function (in Parkin, 1993).
In addition, memory span tasks support the existence of the articulatory loop showing that task ability heavily depends on a

Get Access