episodic buffer

a fourth component added to the 1974 tripartite model of working memory proposed by British cognitive psychologists Alan D. Baddeley (1934– ) and Graham J. Hitch (1946– ). Introduced in 2000 as a further subsidiary of the central executive, the episodic buffer is a temporary multimodal store that combines information from the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad subsystems of working memory with information about time and order to form and maintain an integrated, detailed representation of a given stimulus or event that can then be deposited into long-term memory as necessary. It is “episodic” in the sense that it holds integrated episodes or scenes and a “buffer” in the sense of providing a limited capacity interface between systems using different representational codes. In addressing certain shortcomings of the original working memory model—particularly the failure to explain the process of chunking and the dilemma of linking the two distinct representational formats of the loop and sketchpad—the episodic buffer provides a means to allow multiple sources of information to be considered simultaneously, thus creating a model of the environment that may be manipulated to solve problems and plan future behavior.

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Psychology term of the day

December 24th 2024

phonics

1. a method of teaching reading, popularly known as sounding out, that concentrates on the sounds of the letters or letter combinations in a word rather than on the word as a unit. The speaker or reader thus tries to match graphemes and phonemes. Also called phonic method. Compare whole-word method.

2. a former name for acoustics.