Alan Baddeley

Alan David Baddeley (born 1934) is a British psychologist known for his research on memory and for developing, with Graham Hitch in 1974, the multi-component model of working memory, whose parts are the phonological loop, the central executive and the visuospatial sketchpad, with an episodic buffer added in 2000. Born in Leeds, he studied at University College London, took a master's degree at Princeton in 1957 and a PhD at Cambridge in 1962. He directed the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge from 1974 to 1997 and later became a professor at the University of York. His work includes studies of the word length effect, of amnesia with Barbara Wilson, and of memory underwater. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.