What would be an example of a test showing an intact Phonological Loop but impaired Episodic Buffer?

• A. A scenario where verbal rehearsal is good and sequence recall is accurate
• B. A scenario where verbal rehearsal and sequence recall are good, but integrating items from different modalities into a single episode and recalling it fails
• C. A scenario where spatial updating is perfect but color memory is poor
• D. A scenario where new items are learned without any binding to context

Answer: (B)

The test checks how well different parts of working memory work together when combining information from multiple sources. An intact phonological loop means verbal rehearsal and keeping a sequence of items in order are fine. An impaired Episodic Buffer shows up when you can’t fuse items from different modalities into one cohesive episode and then recall that integrated memory.

In this scenario, verbal rehearsal is good and sequence recall is accurate, but the ability to bind items from different senses (for example, a sound with a color or a spatial detail) into a single remembered event fails. That failure points to a problem with the Episodic Buffer, which is the component that creates and retrieves these integrated, multimodal episodes. The other options don’t isolate this cross-modal binding deficit: they either describe intact binding within the phonological or visuospatial domains, or deficits that don’t specifically test episodic binding across modalities.