ABSTRACT

Born in England in 1934, Alan D. Baddeley is a cognitive psychologist best known for his research on human memory. Cognitive psychology is an area of psychology that examines basic mental processes such as memory, language, attention, and perception. In 1971, Baddeley accepted Graham Hitch as his postdoctoral fellow. A year later, they both moved to the University of Stirling in Scotland, where they wrote the paper, "Working Memory". In the 1960s, memory researchers such as Richard C. Atkinson and Richard M. Shiffrin began to view memory as two systems: a short-term system capable of handling information for just seconds and a long-term system that could theoretically store and manage information indefinitely. These two concepts—first, the distinction between short-term and long-term memory and, second, short-term memory as working memory— became accepted beliefs for memory researchers. "Working Memory" provides the origins and framework of the dominant model for understanding short-term memory. The Baddeley–Hitch model, as it is known, is termed a working memory model.