Alan Baddeley's Model Of Working Memory

Memory is the process in which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. It is our capacity to retain information over time period. It is a crucial aspect of our cognition, if we did not possess memory, we would not be able to remember the past, retain new information, solve problems or plan for the future.

Philosophers and psychologists have tried to define memory from different perspectives and the way memories are stored. Aristotle compared memory to a wax tablet, Plato compared it to an aviary and John Locke compared it to a cabinet. As technology progressed, memory was defined in a more scientific way, in the 1950s memory was compared to a telephone exchange system, and with the invention of the computer andd as it was developed,

The Working Memory Model :-

Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch proposed a model of working memory in 1974, in essence it was a reformulation of the traditional idea of short-term memory. In Baddeley's scheme, working memory is the short-term memory, where, instead of all information going into one single store, there are different systems in this memory for different types of information. Working memory is composed of three separate units –

Executive control system, it is the primary unit, it acts as a supervisory system and controls the flow of information from and to its slave systems, allocating processing resources and coordinating their activity.

Phonological loop or the Articulatory loop, is the second major component in Baddeley's model. It is the place where speech and sound-related information are rehearsed and actively maintained for immediate recall. Phonological Store (inner ear) – is linked to speech perception, i.e. it holds information in speech-based form (i.e. spoken words) for 1-2 seconds. Articulatory control process (inner voice) – is linked to speech production, i.e. it is used to rehearse and store verbal information from the phonological

Each of these processing units or the neural modules is dedicated to a specific task, and are all interconnected. Hence, it has been define as a parallel processing model of information, as in contrast to the information processing of computers of one step at a time, Human brain appear to process information in a parallel fashion, i.e. many modules (collections of interconnected neurons) process information in different ways but simultaneously. These modules may be scattered widely at different locations in the brain and may work on a different aspect of a task, but they do it simultaneously. The more complex the task, the greater the number of modules that are held into operations, thus even a very complex task can be handled very quickly because different aspects of them are being processed at the same