Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewThe episodic buffer: a new component of working memory?
Section snippets
The phonological loop: limits and limitations
The phonological loop gives a reasonably good account of a wide range of data (see Box 2). There are, however, phenomena that do not seem to fit neatly into the picture without serious further modification. Consider, first, the effect of articu-latory suppression, whereby the subject continues to utter an irrelevant word such as ‘the’, while attempting to remember and repeat back a visually presented sequence of numbers. According to the model, suppression should prevent the registration of
The episodic buffer
The episodic buffer is assumed to be a limited-capacity temporary storage system that is capable of integrating information from a variety of sources. It is assumed to be controlled by the central executive, which is capable of retrieving infor-mation from the store in the form of conscious awareness, of reflecting on that information and, where necessary, manipu-lating and modifying it. The buffer is episodic in the sense that it holds episodes whereby information is integrated across space
Some outstanding issues
What problems are raised by the proposed new component of WM? I would suggest, first of all, that there is an immediate need to investigate its boundaries. Why not assign all memory to the episodic buffer, for example? I suggest that the existing evidence for the fractionation of WM, including that from neuropsychology and neuroradiology, indicates that this would be a thoroughly retrograde step6. It is less clear, however, whether one can draw a clear line between the two slave systems of WM
Acknowledgements
This paper was based on a presentation at the Psychonomics Society meeting, Los Angeles, November 1999. I wish to thank Fergus Craik, Sergio Della Sala, Graham Hitch, Susan Gathercole, Christopher Jarrold, Endel Tulving and the anonymous referees for comments on an earlier draft. The support of MRC Grant G9423916 is gratefully acknowledged.
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