- Proposed as an alternative for MSM, challenging the concept of a single unitary store for STM
- Four Components: central executive, phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad, episodic buffer
- Central Executive: controls the slave systems, directs attention to particular tasks, involved with problem solving and decision making, limited capacity so has a limited number of things it can attend to at a time
- Phonological Loop: controls auditory information, further broken down into the phonological store/primary acoustic store (inner ear) and articulatory loop (inner voice)
- Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad: processes visual and spatial information (how things look and where they are – inner eye)
- Episodic Buffer: general store, recalls information from LTM and integrates it into STM when required
