...The working memory model has three separate components. The central executive system allocates attention to different inputs and monitoring the operation of the other two components. The phonological loop has two sub-components, the articulatory control system, where information is rehearsed subvocally, and the phonological store, where speech input is held for a very brief duration. The third component, the visuo-spatial sketchpad deals with visual and spatial information coming either direct from the senses, or retrieved from long-term memory. However, much of the key evidence for this model comes from the study of brain-damaged individuals, where it is impossible to make `before and after` comparisons, thus limiting the validity of any conclusions drawn. Working memory has also been useful in understanding some of the cognitive changes associated with mental illnesses. For example, Park et al. (1999) found that working memory deficit may be an important indicator in schizophrenia. There are many strengths and weaknesses of the working memory model. One strength of the model is that KF who was a brain damaged patient who had an impaired STM. Their model doesnât really explain exactly what the central executive is, apart from being involved in attention. On the other hand, another strength of the model is that Short words are recalled well than long words (the word length effect). This is evidence for the limited capacity of the phonological loop, since more short words...
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...Integration of Working Memory Training Working memory has been a growing topic of interest in the field of Speech Language Pathology. It affects all aspects of children’s development, including speech, language, reading, and classroom success. Working memory deficits are prevalent in people with schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), traumatic brain injuries, learning disabilities, specific language impairment (SLI), and intellectual disabilities (Van der Molen, Van Luit, Van der Molen, Klugkist, & Jongmans, 2010). With the rising awareness of how working memory deficits can effect children’s development, the question of whether speech language pathologists should assess and treat these deficits has been asked more and more. Assessing and treating working memory deficits are key and can help many different populations improve in their speech and language development. Assessment for working memory deficits and working memory training should be standard and included into the normal regime. The following paper will touch on what working memory is. As well as how a deficit in working memory can effect children’s development, whether they are typically developing children, or children with other disorders. Some assessment options and then training techniques of working memory will be introduced as well. What is Working Memory? Working memory requires the ability to attend to new information, retain incoming information, and manipulate the...
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...Outline and evaluate the working memory model In the working memory model, there are four main components; The central executive is the most important component as it is involved in problem solving and decision making. It controls attention and plays a vast part in planning and processing information from subsidiary systems and LTM. It is flexible and can process information. It has a limited capacity and can only contain a limited amount of information at one time, Secondly the phonological loop stores a limited amount of speech-based sounds for quick periods. It contains two components. The phonological store (inner ear) allows acoustically coded items to be stored for a brief timing. The articulatory control process (inner voice) allows subvocal repetition of the items stored in the phonological store. Repetition can be prevented by a technique known as ‘articulatory suppression’. The visuo-spatial scratch pad (inner eye) stores visual and spatial information. It is responsible for setting up and manipulating mental images. It has a limited capacity but the limits of the system are independent. The episodic buffer interrogates and manipulates material in the working memory. It has a limited capacity, depending a lot on executive processing. It is capable of binding together information from different sources into chunks/episodes. It interrogates material from LTM to meet the requirements of working memory. The working memory model has many advantages which are that it...
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...Bergstrom and Nyberg, working memory requires most regions of the brain and is truly dependent on what information is going to be maintained. Many studies have established the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) as a critical area for working memory, but the breakdown of its organization is unclear. It is certain that the left ventral PFC is for verbal working memory tasks and the right dorsal PFC is for spatial working memory tasks; as concluded by Nee. Nee carried out a meta-analysis of thirty-six experiments and illustrated exactly where these regions are located to eliminate confusion. Other highlighted regions involved in working memory include the superior parietal cortex, for selective attention, and the Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL), needed when working memory capacity is reached. The superior parietal cortex was studied by Awh (2006) and concluded how attention...
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...Discuss the process of working memory including the areas of the brain associated with short-term memory and encoding. We received information to our amygdala, and then it’s passed to the hippocampus, which is where short-term memories are formed. The hippocampus forms short-term memories by encoding the new information, which means the hippocampus attempts to link the new sensory input to existing memory via pattern seeking (Willis & Mitchell, 2014). For example, an object is round and bounces (new information), balls are round and bounce (existing memory); therefore, this object is a ball. When encoding takes place successfully, neurons in the hippocampus become active and make the new information available as short-term or working memory....
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...I. Proposed Project Title A Study on the Effect of Chewing Gum on Students’ Working Memory II. Objectives of the Study The study aims to characterize the relationship between chewing of gum and the working memory of students from the College of Engineering. Specifically, the study aims to discern whether chewing gum positively affects working memory capacity whether through visual digits, shapes, or simple math. By determining the results, the study also aims to inform students of a useful tool in focusing on course material. III. Review of Relevant Literature Working memory capacity is a type of memory used daily, and is especially important in education as it measures the potential to learn. Stephens and Tunney (2004a) found that chewing gum improved working memory capacity, specifically digit span and spatial span. Hirano et al. (2008) came to the same conclusion through a different measure of working memory (the n-back task). According to Allen and Smith (2009), further research is needed in order to support this claim. IV. Process Diagram The response variable, working memory capacity, will be measured through a test that measures the ability to recall, in correct order, an increasing sequence of units, such as digits or shapes. Tests of this nature are available for free online, some of which, such as GoCognitive...
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...Discuss the working memory model The working memory model was proposed by Baddeley & Hitch as an alternative to the multi-store model of memory. It has been developed to directly challenge the concept of a single unitary store for short-term memory. It is divided into four components, being the central executive, phonological loop ( which includes the two sub components , auditory and articiulatory store) episodic buffer and the visuo spatial sketch pad. The most important component is the central executive; it is involved in problem solving/decision-making. It also controls attention and plays a major role in planning and synthesizing information. It is flexible and can process information from any modality which makes it modality free, although it does have a limited storage capacity and so can attend to a limited number if things at one time. Lastly the CE is responsible for monitoring the slave systems ( the other components) and directing which slave system to send information to. Another component of the working memory model is the phonological loop, it stores a limited number of speech-based sounds for brief periods. It is thought to consist of two components - the auditory store (inner ear)which is modality specific as it receives it’s inputs from the ear and long term memory, it allows acoustically coded items to be stored for a brief period. The articulatory store (the inner voice) allows repetition of the material stored in the phonological store. This slave...
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...Introduction Murner-Lavanchy et al (2014) wondered whether there was a difference in visuospatial working memory in children that were born very preterm and those who were born at a normal time. The definition of working memory that they use for this study is the ability to encode and actively process task relevant information in mind over a short period of time. Working memory is very important in helping to meet the challenges of daily life and the performance of academic tasks. This is showing that working memory capacity is essential for the cognitive development throughout childhood. The aim of this study was to investigate the visuospatial working memory network in a relatively large sample of very preterm and term born children comparable for age,...
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...Atkinson and Shiffrin's (1968) Multi-Store model of memory was extremely successful in terms of the amount of research it generated. However, it became apparent that there were a number of problems with their ideas concerning the characteristics of short-term memory. Baddeley and Hitch (1974) developed an alternative model of short-term memory which they called working memory. Baddeley and Hitch (1974) argue that the multi-store model is too simplistic. Instead of all information going into one single store, there are different systems for different types of information. Working memory consists of a central executive which controls and co-ordinates the operation of two subsystems: the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad. Baddley and Hitch investigated if participants can use different parts of working memory at the same time. They conducted an experiment in which participants were asked two perform two tasks at the same time - a digit span task which required them to repeat a list of numbers, and a verbal reasoning task which required them to answer true or false questions. The result was that as the number of digits increased in the digit span task, participants took longer to answer the reasoning questions, but not much longer. They didn't make any more errors in the verbal reasoning task as the number of digits increased. This was also known as the dual method. They concluded that the verbal reasoning task made us of the central executive and the digit span...
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...Memory is very like a storage unit in the brain. It can keep memory stored for a short period of time, short term memory or working memory, and for a long period of time, long term memory. There are various types of memory that make up our memory storage such as general knowledge, things you have learned and metamemory, which is your own awareness of your memory. Many researchers predict that the information storage capacity of humans is up to 50,000 topics on every subject that we have a reasonable amount of knowledge in (Norman, 2001). Short term memory allows us to remember a telephone number for the few seconds it takes us to dial the number (Eysenck and Keane, 2015). Baddeley and Hitch (1974) suggested replacing the concept of the short term store with that of working memory. Working memory is defined as a system that temporarily holds and manipulates information as we perform cognitive tasks. This is for the reason that short term memory stored brief information about an outcome of an early incident and then the memory moves straight onto another outcome and the previous one is forgotten. It just was not sufficient enough. Working memory is the development of short...
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...Outline and evaluate the working memory model. The working memory model was proposed in 1974 by Baddeley and Hitch, who felt that Atkinson and Schifrin’s multi store model, was too simplistic, therefore the working memory model acted as an alternative, unlike the multi store model the working memory model presents short term memory stores because it focuses on the short term memory. The term working memory is used by Baddeley and Hitch to refer to the part of the memory that is active, for example calculating sums or reading a sentence all of which are collecting data to be stored. There are three parts main of the original working memory model: the central executive, phonological loop, visual spatial sketch pad and the later added episodic buffer. The central executive controls attention and draws on the other the other two systems also known as slave systems. The central executive only has a limited capacity, which is supported by the dual task technique. This is when an individual struggles to do tasks that require the same component – this is because they are competing for the central executive’s capacity. There is evidence to suggest that there may be more than one component of the central executive, for example Eslinger and Damasio study. Their findings were that a patient, who had recently had a brain tumour removed, performed well on tasks that required reasoning, but not on decision making tasks. The two slave systems in the working memory model have similarities...
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...Outline and evaluate the Working Memory Model. The Working Memory Model (WMM) is a model of the STM. The WMM was proposed by Baddeley and Hitch when they carried out a Dual-task method experiment only to find that the MSM was too simple as it stated that the STM is only one store. The model shows that information is first received by the Central Executive. The Central Executive has overall control of the STM and it is multi-modal meaning it can process information from different senses. This information can then go to one of two stores. If it is speech-based information it will be transferred to the Phonological Loop. It has two subcomponents, phonological store and articulatory control process. The phonological store is the inner ear and contains snippets of sounds either from the outside world or recalled from long term memory. The articulatory control process is the inner voice which essentially is our own voice inside our heads as it constantly repeats or rehearses information so therefore preventing forgetting by decay. The visuo-spatial sketch pad is visual short term memory, or the inner eye. It can manipulate images in two and three dimensions. The WMM shows memory as an active process as the Central Executive can store and retrieve information from either slave store. As this is a model of the STM, all three stores have a limited duration and capacity. A good thing about the WMM is that it’s pioneering. This model is the first of its kind to explain STM as having separate...
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...The working memory model (Baddeley and Hitch 1974) replaced the idea of a unitary STM, it suggests a system involving active processing and short term storage of information. The working memory model consists of four components which each have a different job. The Central executive (CE) is the key component and can be described as attention. It has a limited capacity and controls two ‘slave’ systems that also have limited capacity. The function of the CE is to direct attention to particular tasks, determining how the brain's ‘resources’ are used for the task. The ‘resources’ are the three ‘slave’ systems. Data arrives from the senses or from the long term memory. Because the CE has a very limited capacity it can’t attend to too many things at once and has no capacity for storing data. The next component is the Phonological loop (PL) which is one of the ‘slave’ systems. This deals with auditory information and preserves the order of information. Baddeley (1986) further subdivided this loop into: - The phonological store which holds the words you hear, like and inner ear. - An articulatory process which is used for words that are heard or seen. These words are silently repeated like an inner voice. This is a form of maintenance rehearsal. The next component is the episodic buffer which is another ‘slave’ system. Baddeley (2000) added the episodic buffer because he realised the model needed a general store. The Phonological loop and Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad...
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...Outline and Evaluate the Working Memory Model The working memory model (WM) explains why we can do two different tasks at the same time, but not two similar tasks. It replaced the idea of a unitary short term memory (STM) in the working memory model information is passed from STM to the central executive and this decides if the information is visual or auditory. Information is then passed to the corresponding store. The central executive is a key component of the WM. It directs information from STM to one of the "slave systems" It also has a very limited capacity and duration so can't attend to too many things at once. The first "slave system" is the phonological loop. This deals with auditory information and maintains the order of the information. It consists of two stores, the phonological store which is like an inner ear and deals with sounds and the articulatory process is used for words which are heard or seen. These words are silently repeated (looped) like an inner voice. The next "slave system" is the visuo-spatial sketchpad. This deals with visual information and spatial information is the relationship between this information. This store is used when you have to plan a spatial task such as getting from one room to another or counting the number of windows your house has. Hitch and Baddley showed support for the WM by conducting an experiment where they gave participants two tasks to do at the same time. They found participants were slower completing these tasks...
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...Outline and evaluate the working memory model (12 marks) Baddeley and Hitch proposed that memory has 4 components. The central executive, phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad and the episodic buffer. The central executive decides how to share out and direct attention to incoming information. The phonological loop can be thought of as a maintenance rehearsal mechanism for retaining verbal information. It is sub-divided into two other components, the phonological store (inner ear), which holds acoustically coded information, and the articulatory process (inner voice), which allows for sub vocal rehearsal (words you are about to say). Furthermore, the visuospatial sketchpad (inner eye) is responsible for storing visual and spatial information. In other words, it codes information in images and can create and manipulate visual and spatial images. Finally, the episodic buffer. This component takes information from different sources and integrates them together. For example, Baddeley suggested if we imagine an elephant playing ice hockey, we have to draw out images stored in long term memory and combine them into a moving image. The working memory model is good and is an improvement over the multi-store model. It demonstrates how the short term memory works because it explains how we can store information briefly and simultaneously manipulate it, for example, mental arithmetic. This shows that the model has face validity, which means that the test appears to measure what it is...
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