Chapter 2, page 35
Figure 2.5. When you mentally rotate the object on the left, will it match the object on the right?
When you carry out the mental rotation, you use your visuospatial sketchpad.
There is evidence that the phonological loop system and the visuospatial sketchpad are partly
independent. People can process more information in the two systems together than they can in either
system alone.
The central executive is the system that manages all the work that occurs within working memory.
It is the least understood of the working memory systems because it is the hardest to investigate. The
central executive controls operations within the phonological loop system and the visuospatial sketchpad.
It also plays a role in comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving. People with high central executive
memory capacity can remember a greater amount of meaningful material (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980).
This ability is crucial to understand complex ideas. For instance, read the following passage and see if you
can spot a contradiction.
Erin loved to read in her house on winter evenings, although this particular evening was rather
warm. She cuddled up in front of the fire and took out her philosophy textbook. As she read, she
thought she heard an odd noise outside. It sounded alarmingly like a footstep outside her window.
She set aside John Locke and his ideas about the mind as a blank slate and got up out of her chair.
She heard the sound again, but this time she was less sure what it was. Some might have called her
foolhardy, but she grabbed a baseball bat and headed out the door. An icy wind greeted her as she
stepped outside.To notice the contradiction (there would not be an icy wind on a warm evening), you have to be able to
retain some information from the first part of the paragraph until you reach the end. The ability to retain
large amounts of meaningful information of this sort in memory is a hallmark of people with large
executive processing capacity. People with smaller executive processing capacity are less likely to be able
to notice the contradiction (cf. A. D. Baddeley, 1999, pp. 67-68).
The central executive is involved in storing information such as the information that Rachel read
about lobsters. Yet the central executive can extend the overall capacity of working memory by sending
some information to the phonological loop or the visuospatial sketchpad. For instance, if Rachel stores
part of the information about the lobsters as a visual image in the visuospatial sketchpad, she may be able
to retain more information at once in working memory.