ABSTRACT
The widespread acceptance of the central role played by working memory in cognition has its roots in the highly successful model of working memory introduced originally by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974, and revised by Baddeley in 1986. One of the reasons that this model has made such a significant impact is that it offers a far more flexible characterization of short-term memory than earlier theories such as those of Waugh and Norman (1965) and Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). These theories were developed primarily to account for the short-term retention of verbal information only, and they offered an essentially static view of short-term memory. According to both, memory items are represented in phonological form in a temporary store of limited capacity where they can be lost as a consequence of either decay or interference. Through rehearsal, it was suggested that items could be maintained in the
temporary store, and could also be successfully transferred into a more durable semantically based memory system.
