Baddeley and Hitch (19740 were the first people to explore the idea of a memory system that focuses on the short term memory being an active multicomponent store. After much research they concluded that short term memory is a very complex and flexible system which consists of a central control and a number of ‘slave’ systems. These components can work independently from each other.
The central executive is the most important component of this system as it co-ordinates the slave systems. It has some storage capacity and decides what to focus on, synthesizing information from the slave systems.
The articulatory phonological loop stores sounds for short periods of time and holds information in a speech based format. This is one of the slave systems. It is
It is altoghwether too simple because it does not elaborate on the control processes and is vague about the functioning of the central executive.
The visuo-spatial scratch pad is like an inner eye. It stores and repeats images. This is specialised in visual and spatial coding and storing but has a limited capacity. It is independent from the phonological system. So the phonological loop may by active whilst the visuo-spatial scratchpad is making spatial decisions etc.
Sophie Trent
Baddeley and Hitch suggested that we can only use one component of a slave system at a time though. By reading a page in a book and sub vocally repeating the word ‘the’ over and over, this confuses the system and the interference gets in
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