Chapter Questions
Describe two findings that led Baddeley to begin considering alternatives to the modal model.
What are the differences between STM and working memory?
Describe Baddeley's three-component model of working memory.
Describe the phonological similarity effect, the word length effect, and the effect of articulatory suppression. What do these effects indicate about the phonological loop?
Describe the visuospatial sketch pad, the Shepard and Meltzger mental rotation task Della Sala's visual pattern task, and Brooks's "F" task. Be sure you understand what each task indicates about the visuospatial sketch pad.
What is the central executive? What happens when executive function is lost because of damage to the frontal lobe? Describe Vogel's experiment that measured the ERP in high-working-memory-capacity and low-working-memory-capacity subjects as they were carrying out a change detection task. What does the result of this experiment indicate about the central executive in these two types of subjects?
What is the episodic buffer? Why was it proposed, and what are its functions?
The physiology of working memory has been studied using (1) brain lesions in monkeys (2) neural recording from monkeys, and (3) brain imaging in humans. What do the results of each of these procedures tell us about working memory and the brain? Be sure you understand the neural mind reading procedure used in the brain imaging experiments.
Describe the two experiments that demonstrated ways to decrease the amount of work ing memory available for a task. Describe the experiment that showed how to decrease worrying and therefore increase available working memory.