ABSTRACT
The central executive (CE) component of the Baddeley & Hitch (1974) working memory (WM) model was initially intended to avoid the need for the model to deal with phenomena that went beyond the scope of shortterm memory problems. The application of the model beyond laboratory tasks has inevitably brought more and more of these ‘complex’ aspects of task performance into play. While the general conception of the CE as an attentional organiser or contention scheduler has allowed some of these aspects to be dealt with, there remains no detailed account of how the CE is organised, how it functions, or more importantly, how it might fail to function. With the rise of interest in ‘dysexecutive syndrome’ this has become a critical problem for the application of the WM model.
