Middlebrooks Catherine D, Kerr Tyson, Castel Alan D
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Aug;28(8):1103-1115. doi: 10.1177/0956797617702502. Epub 2017 Jun 12.
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.
分心和一心多用通常对学习和记忆有害。然而，人们经常在听音乐、坐在嘈杂的咖啡店或者时不时查看电子邮件时学习。当前的实验研究了分心和注意力分散如何影响一个人选择性记忆有价值信息的能力。参与者在完成数字检测任务、听音乐或者没有分心的情况下学习价值从1到10分不等的单词列表。尽管与其他条件相比，参与者在数字检测后回忆起的单词较少，但在选择性记忆最有价值的单词方面，各条件之间没有显著差异。在各种不同程度强调注意力和工作记忆的注意力分散任务中都得到了类似的结果，这表明人们可能通过选择性地关注最有价值的项目来弥补注意力分散的代价，而且那些使记忆变差的因素不一定会损害选择性记忆重要信息的能力。
