The Four Components of Your Working Memory

I have been describing the working memory as a single thing—like
a temporary storage box. In fact, cognitive psychologists today think
of the memory as having several components, and you can work on
making improvements for each of these components to improve the
initial processing of items in your memory. You might think of this
process as fine-tuning the different components in a home entertainment
system. For optimal quality and enjoyment, you need to fully
coordinate your big-screen television, VCR, DVD, cable or satellite
hookup, and sound system.
According to this current working memory model, which was
developed by Alan Baddeley in 2000, there are four major components
that together enable you to hold several bits or chunks of information
in your mind at the same time, so your mind can work on
this information and then use it.17 Commonly, these bits of information
will be interrelated, such as when you are reading a sentence
and need to remember the beginning before you get to the end—
though as a sentence gets longer and more complicated, you may
find that you are losing the sense of it, especially if you get distracted
while you are reading. But sometimes you might juggle some disparate
bits of information, such as when you are driving and trying to
remember where to turn off at the same time that you are having a
conversation with a friend. Another example of this juggling is when
you use your working memory to do mental arithmetic, like when
you are balancing a checkbook; thinking about a problem and trying
to figure out how to solve it; or following a discussion at a meeting
and comparing what one person has just argued with what someone
else said before.
The four key working memory components are coordinated by a
kind of manager called the ‘‘central executive,’’ which is in charge
of the other three components: the ‘‘visuospatial sketchpad,’’ the
‘‘episodic buffer,’’ and the ‘‘phonological loop.’’ Since they work independently
of each other, you can handle a series of different memory
tasks at the same time, such as remembering a visual image at
the same time that you remember something you are listening to.
You might think of these separate components as all part of a workbench
that processes any information coming into it, such as the
perceptions from the senses and any long-term memories pulled out
of storage. Then, your working memory variously handles, combines,
or transforms this material and passes some of these materials it has
worked on into your long-term memory.18 So one way to improve
your memory is to improve the ability of each of these elements of
your working memory to process information so that you can more
effectively and efficiently send the information you want into your
long-term memory.
A chart of these four components of your working memory,
which is based on Alan Baddeley’s working memory model, looks
something like this:
So what exactly do these four components do? Here’s the latest
scoop on what modern psychologists are thinking: