My one confusion from the reading is what is different between the roles of the “central executive” and the “episodic buffer”. The latter’s definition is a little short, but from what I understand, they both generally integrate information from the other agents in the working memory. I’m just not sure what unique purpose the episodic buffer serves.
According to Information Processing Theory, learning is a mostly internal mental process. Instead of a stimuli-response situation, information is stored, encoded, and retrieved by the brain through the related three stages of processing, the sensory memory, working memory, and long term memory. The implications this definition has for teachers is that they need to direct student’s attention to the important information and keep them focused, they need to know successful ways of helping their students encode information, and they need to decrease the amount of information lost by students on its way to long term memory. This means that teachers need to explain things multiple times in different ways. The book mentioned that someone is much more likely to remember something if they have a visual and a verbal representation of the information. Therefore, teachers need to be prepared to give students the best chance to commit information to memory.
If a student needs to learn the causes of World War I for an upcoming history quiz, they are going to already have been exposed to the information, either through a teacher’s lecture, or reading the textbook. The next step is encoding the information. To remember it for a quiz, the student might use a mnemonic device, like making a sentence out of key words, and they will probably chunk it up, dividing the causes into subcategories, like long and short term causes, or economic and political causes. Eventually the student will rehearse the information enough in the working memory that it will hopefully stick in the long-term memory and will be easily retrievable for the next day’s quiz.
I think the main difference between the central executive and the episodic buffer is that the central executive is in a way "in charge" or like a supervisor as the book states and the episodic buffer is only a TEMPORARY storage place for the visuospatial sketchpad and phonological loop, and that this is like just one part of the central executive, but also the central executive and episodic buffer work together some of the time with working memory.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your statement of confusion, as I had the same one in my post. And even with the above blog reply by Lindzy, I still am confused with the relationship between the central executive, episodic buffer, visuospatial sketchpad and the phonological loop. A few more examples would probably help me see it more clearly possibly. I agree that encouraging the student to use mnumonic devices (acronyms especially) is a good idea, but I also think that the teacher should stress the student (especially in a history class) not to rely on them for everything. Because I did that in my history class and ended up not remembering what they even stood for. Oops.
ReplyDeleteI found this very confusing as well. I think the central executive is a process (like a man in your head telling you what to pay attention to) and the episodic buffer tells the information that is important where to go. I know this sounds insane, but that's how I understood it.
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