According to Alan Baddeley, of the University of Bristol’s psychology department, short term memory, in the same way as long term memory, submits to the game of subdivisions. At the top of the pyramid, a central administrator, also called an attentional manager, fulfils the functions of an orchestra conductor. In the hypothesis of a mental calculation, for example, it would manage how operations unfold. Nonetheless, because of limited resources, it cannot manage and store at the same time; consequently it would leave it up to slave systems to carry out the task of temporarily storing information.

At this point in time, Baddeley’s model only contains two systems of this type: the visio-spatial register, for mental images, or the phonological loop, for verbal elements. But it is conceivable that other entities of the same nature exist, related for example to motor information. In Baddeley’s approach the phonological loop contains two components: the phonological store, which retains sounds – words – for a few seconds in the memory, and the mechanism of articulatory recapitulation, which reintroduces these elements continually in order that they remain available for the necessary time.