Is WM still working ? 1 Is Working Memory still working ?

Is WM still working? 3 The term working memory appears to have been first proposed by Miller, Galanter and Pribram (1960) in their classic book Plans and the Structure of Behavior. The term has subsequently been used in computational modelling approaches (Newell & Simon, 1972), and in animal learning studies, in which the participant animals are required to hold information across a number of trials within the same day (Olton, 1979). Finally, within cognitive psychology, the term has been adopted to cover the system or systems involved in the temporary maintenance and manipulation of information. Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) applied the term to a unitary short-term store, in contrast to the proposal of Baddeley and Hitch (1974) who used it to refer to a system comprising multiple components. They emphasized the functional importance of this system, as opposed to its simple storage capacity. It is this latter concept of a multicomponent working memory that forms the focus of the discussion that follows. I myself have been using the concept for over 25 years; does it still work? Before addressing this issue, it is perhaps appropriate to consider what are the criteria for " working ". The multicomponent model of working memory was proposed as a theoretical framework whose function was to give an economical and coherent account of a relatively wide range of data. Its success should be judged in terms of its continuing capacity to do so, and to prompt new questions which in turn add to our basic understanding of cognition. To " work " , therefore, requires breadth of coverage, coupled with a capacity to stimulate further research and to incorporate more precise quantitative and/ or computational models. So how well is working memory working? Baddeley and Hitch (1974) proposed that the earlier unitary concept should be elaborated into a three component system. As Figure 1 shows, this comprised a limited capacity attentional controller, the central executive, aided by two subsystems, one concerned with acoustic and verbal information, the articulatory (subsequently phonological) loop, while the other performed a similar function for visual and spatial information, the visuo-spatial scratchpad (subsequently sketchpad). 1 Much of the earlier work concentrated on these two subsystems, on the grounds that they appeared to offer more tractable problems than the central executive. For that reason they will be discussed first. 1 Articulatory was changed to phonological to emphasise the fact that the system …