Selectively Distracted: Divided Attention and Memory for Important Information

Abstract

Distractions and multitasking are generally detrimental to learning and memory. Nevertheless, people often study while listening to music, sitting in noisy coffee shops, or intermittently checking their e-mail. The current experiments examined how distractions and divided attention influence one's ability to selectively remember valuable information. Participants studied lists of words that ranged in value from 1 to 10 points while completing a digit-detection task, while listening to music, or without distractions. Though participants recalled fewer words following digit detection than in the other conditions, there were no significant differences between conditions in terms of selectively remembering the most valuable words. Similar results were obtained across a variety of divided-attention tasks that stressed attention and working memory to different degrees, which suggests that people may compensate for divided-attention costs by selectively attending to the most valuable items and that factors that worsen memory do not necessarily impair the ability to selectively remember important information.

Keywords: distractions; divided attention; memory; selectivity; value-directed remembering.

Fig. 1.

Results from Experiment 1: mean proportion of items recalled across the six lists as a function of item value and study condition. Error bars show ±1 SE.

Fig. 2.

Results from Experiment 1: mean proportion of items recalled as a function of item value and study condition, separately for List 1 and List 6 (the final studied list). Error bars show ±1 SE.

Fig. 3.

Illustration of the design of Experiment 2. As participants saw each to-be-remembered word (along with its point value), they heard two consecutive tones (top rows). Each tone was pseudorandomly chosen to be low or high pitched. In the three experimental conditions (bottom rows), participants had to identify each tone as low or high (tone-monitoring condition), identify the two tones as the same or a different pitch (paired-tones condition), or identify whether each tone was the same as or different from the previous tone (1-back condition). In a fourth condition (the full-attention condition), participants completed the primary task, but no tones were played.

Fig. 4.

Results from Experiment 2: mean proportion of items recalled across the six lists as a function of item value and study condition. Error bars show ±1 SE.

Fig. 5.

Results from Experiment 2: mean proportion of items recalled as a function of item value and study condition, separately for List 1 and List 6 (the final studied list). Error bars show ±1 SE.