If you have enjoyed these pages or found them useful, you may like to donate. Even the smallest donation helps with the site’s running costs.

The upper graphic shows how the Working Memory Model (Alan Baddeley & Graham Hitch 1974) brings to life the Multi-Store Model of Richard Atkinson & Richard Shiffrin (1968) - at least as far as short-term memory is concerned.

The Multi-Store Model doesn’t at all explain a number of facets of memory - eg: remembering things you experienced much earlier in the day but didn’t focus on/learn them in the way Atkinson & Shiffrin proposed would be necessary. Even so, it provides a good explanation of the way memory seems to work in terms of the length of time something is remembered for, being passed from store to.

However, it portrays memory as flat information, to which little is done beyond encoding and rehearsal.

In contrast the Working Memory Model shows how alive the processes are in short-term memory, with a decision-making element (the central executive) deciding what to do with information in consciousness, either fresh information or old information retrieved from long-term memory. This information is represented primarily either visually or acoustically.

The lower graphic shows how Integrated SocioPsychology concepts almost certainly underpin the workings of memory.

In the enhanced version of the Multi-Store Model, vMEMES are shown to be influencing the filtering and acceptance of information into long-term memory via meta-programmes, based on values. (Fergus Craik & Robert Lockhart’s Levels of Processing model showed how important meaning (semantics) is to memory - the more you think about something because of what it means to you, the more likely you are to remember

it. The colouring of the meta-programme text hints at which vMEMES are most likely to be driving the meta-programme valuing.

In the enhanced version of the Working Memory model, vMEMES are again exerting their influence - this time upon the decision-making of the central executive. The decision-making is processed via certain meta-programmes.

Of course, hard research is needed to establish the validity of this view of how vMEMES and meta-programmes play their part in the functioning of memory. But, logically, it provides a potential good proposition for understanding the motivational underpinning for how memory works.