Heather Henry alerted me to these fantastic youtube clips – the multi-store model and the working memory model set to Rudolf the Rednose Reindeer and Jingle Bells. Just in time for Christmas.
Posts tagged with working memory
I am again grateful to an enquiry from a teacher about an apparent contradiction – this time between our AS Complete Companion and another AS book. Logie (1995) proposed that the visuo-spatial sketchpad (a component of the working memory model) could be further divided into a visual cache and inner scribe. In the Complete Companion we have said that the cache is a store and the scribe deals with spatial relations, whereas another AS book says that the cache is a store and the scribe is a rehearsal mechanism. Both versions are correct and both lack detail.The visual cache is a passive store. It holds information about form and colour. However some research evidence (e.g. Coleman and LeFevre, 2002) has found that information is actively rehearsed.The inner scribe is an active rehearsal component. It is proposed to deal with spatial and movement information. There also may be some storage component.Any further comments welcome!
I was recently asked by a teacher to explain an apparent contradiction in the text on working memory. On page 12 of the AS Complete Companion the text says that the central executive component of the Working Memory Model has a ‘very limited capacity’ but later, on the same page the text says the central executive has ‘no storage capacity’. Sounds like a contradiction! But on closer inspection there isn’t a contradiction – of course the the central executive has to have some capacity to direct attention but it has no extra storage capacity. I did double check this with Professor Alan Baddeley, who says ‘I assume that the executive has limited attentional capacity, but does not act as a store. Central storage in working memory is now assumed to depend on the episodic buffer’.
Keep your queries coming in!
BBC radio 4 has been running an interesting series called Am I normal? One of the programmes looks at Working Memory and what is normal in terms of how people can use there working memories. Have a look here. Research suggests that working meory is the single most important predictor of later academic success – the big question then is, how can you improve your working memory?
In the AS Complete Companion the arrows were incorrectly drawn in the diagram. The correct version is shown below and will appear in more recent reprints.