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Nature vs.

Nurture Stance

 

 

S.P.

Alan Baddeley would fall under the nurture stance, due to his proposed model of working memory, which consists of the central executive, visuospatial sketchpad and phonological loop as a method of encoding. Rehearsal is the conscious repetition of information, either to maintain it in consciousness or to encode it for storage, and it is a big part of the working memory. This would fall under nurture as it deals with a certain type of behavior rather than genes or hereditary factors.It something we have to do continuously to get better at. This show how our environment and other behavioral factors take place. Also, working memory is not instinctive, but instead its what we experience in daily lives.

 

School of

Thought/ Perspective

 

Alan Baddeley falls into the cognitive school/ perspective of psychology. This school mainly deals with how humans learn, think, observe, and remember. Memory is included under this school of thought. Alan Baddeley focused on memory, specifically working memory throughout his career, so this is the school of thought he belongs to. 

A.M.

 

Unit Most Likely To Cover

Psychologist

 

 

S.R.

 

Alan Baddeley Timeline

 

BIRTH/DEATH DATES

born March 23, 1934

 

PROFESSIONAL TIMELINE

  • graduated from University College London with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology (1956)

  • received a Master’s degree at Princeton University (1957)

  • joined the MRC Applied Psychology Unit (APU) at the University of Cambridge(scientific staff, 1958-1967) and completed his PhD (1962)

  • moved to the University of Sussex as a Lecturer, then a Reader (1967-1972)...

  • ...then to a Chair at Stirling University (Professor of Psychology, 1972-1974)...

  • ...then back to the APU to serve as a Director for 21 years (1974-1995)

  • Senior Research Fellow at Churchill College (Cambridge, 1987-1995)

  • Honorary Professor of Cognitive Psychology at University of Cambridge (1991-1995)

  • moved to Bristol University for eight years as a Professor of Psychology (1995-2003)

  • currently based at the Department of Psychology at the University of York (2003-present)

J.G.

 

Key Terms/Concepts

S.P.

  • Short-term memory- memory that contains only the small amount of information that a person is actively using. 

  • Long-term memory-The large-capacity memory that contains ones memory for experiences and information that accumulated over a lifetime.

  • Chunk-The basic unit of short-term memory, consisting of several components that are strongly associated with one another.

  • Rehearsal-In memory, the repetition of information to be learned.

  • Phonological loop- specialized to briefly store speech-based information about the sounds of language contains two separate components: an acoustic code (the sounds we heard), which decays in a few seconds, and rehearsal, which allows us to repeat the words in the phonological store

  • Visuospatial working memory- stores visual and spatial information, including visual imagery.

  • Episodic buffer- Stores a limited amount of sound-based and visual and spatial information and integrates it with information from LTM to form a single, multi-dimensional representation of the information

  • Central executive- An area of working memory that monitors, coordinates and integrates information received from the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer and LTM.

  • Phonological store- Hold representations of sounds for up to 2 seconds

  • Working memory- proposed by Alan Baddeley and is a three-part system that temporarily holds information while a person is working on a cognitive task, its a limited capacity system, and information is stored there for only a brief time, interacts with long-term memory, drawing information from long-term memory and transmitting information to long-term memory for longer storage.

 

 

Psychologists’ Contributions,

Research, Experimentation

 

 

  • Research

    • researched human memory, neuropsychology, and the practical uses of cognitive psychology

    • Helped research the design for the United Kingdom's postcodes

  • Experimentation

    • Carried out many neuropsychological tests

      • Doors and people 

      • Children's test of nonword repetition

      • Rivermean Behavioural memory test

      • Autographical Memory Interview 

      • Visual Patterns Test

      • Speed and Capacity of Language Processing Test

  • Contributions

    • Coined the concept of a working memory with Graham Hitch 

    • Made models of the different sections of working memory such as phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer

    • Contributed many works to memory, specifically short term/ working memory

 

A.M.

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