A student tries to hold a phone number in mind while simultaneously repeating 'the the the' aloud. Which component of Baddeley's working memory model is most directly disrupted by the repetition task?
AThe central executive
BThe visuospatial sketchpad
CThe episodic buffer
DThe phonological loop
Articulatory suppression (repeating a meaningless sound) occupies the phonological loop, which rehearses verbal and acoustic information. Because the loop is busy, it cannot also rehearse the phone number, disrupting verbal serial recall. This is a classic experimental demonstration that the phonological loop is a distinct, capacity-limited subsystem.
Question 2 True / False
Working memory capacity is best measured by counting the total number of individual items (letters, digits, words) a person can recall, regardless of how familiar those items are.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Capacity is measured in chunks, not raw items. A chess expert can encode a mid-game board position as a few meaningful chunks rather than 32 individual piece locations. Familiarity and expertise allow more information to be packed into each chunk, so raw item count conflates capacity with chunking efficiency.
Question 3 Short Answer
How does expertise effectively expand a person's functional working memory capacity within their domain?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Experts chunk familiar patterns into single units stored as one slot rather than many. A chess master sees 'kingside castled position under attack' as one chunk; a novice sees 12 separate piece locations. By encoding more information per chunk, experts free up capacity for higher-level reasoning about the same situation.
Working memory capacity itself (roughly 4 chunks) does not change with expertise — the size and information density of each chunk does. This is why expertise feels like expanded capacity: the cognitive bottleneck shifts from storage to higher-level processing.