Memory failure predicted by attention lapsing and media multitasking

Abstract

Summary: With the explosion of digital media and technologies, commentators have become increasingly vocal about the role that an ‘attention economy’ plays in our lives. 1 The rise of today’s digital culture coincides with longstanding scientific questions about why humans sometimes remember and sometimes forget, and why some individuals remember better than others. 2 – 6 We examined whether spontaneous attention lapses –– in the moment 7 – 12 , across individuals 13 – 15 , and as a function of everyday media multitasking 16 – 19 –– negatively relate to remembering. EEG+pupillometry measures of attention 20 – 21 were recorded as 80 young adults performed a goal-directed episodic encoding and retrieval task 22 . Trait-level sustained attention was further quantified via task-based 23 and questionnaire measures 24 – 25 . Leveraging trial-to-trial retrieval data, we show that tonic lapses of attention in the moment prior to remembering, assayed by posterior alpha power and pupil diameter, related to reductions in neural signals of goal coding and memory, along with behavioral forgetting. Independent measures of trait-level attention lapsing mediated the relationship between neural assays of lapsing and memory performance, and between media multitasking and memory. Attention lapses partially account for why we remember or forget in the moment, and why some individuals remember better than others. Heavier media multitasking is associated with a propensity to suffer attention lapses and forgetting.

Avoid Zoom Fatigue, Be Present and Learn

“…On the average we now check our phones 96 times a day-that is once every 10 minutes and an increase of 20% as compared to two years ago (Asurion, 2019). Those who do media multitasking, such as texting while doing a task, perform significantly worse on memory tasks than those who are not multitasking (Madore et al, 2020). Multitasking is negatively correlated with school performance (Giunchiglia, Zeni, Gobbi, Bignotti, & Bison, 2018).…”

Temporal Regularity May Not Improve Memory for Item-Specific Detail

“…Similar effects have also been reported when attention is directed to specific features (Rock and Gutman, 1981 ; MacDonald and MacLeod, 1998 ) or objects (Yi and Chun, 2005 ; Aly and Turk-Browne, 2016 ). Additionally, pre-stimulus brain activity driven by attention, which may index “readiness,” predicts subsequent memory performance (Park and Rugg, 2010 ; Uncapher et al, 2011 ; Madore et al, 2020 ). Given these links between attention and memory encoding (see Aly and Turk-Browne, 2017 ; Hannula, 2018 for review), it is possible that the indirect upregulation of attention by temporal expectation, and the associated increase in anticipatory brain activity, may also have beneficial effects on memory.…”

El uso del teléfono móvil en clase y su efecto sobre el engagement académico y el agotamiento: Un estudio de diario en estudiantes universitarios

“…Del mismo modo, este estudio muestra que la multitarea es mala para el engagement académico y el agotamiento. Los hallazgos del presente estudio van en la línea del reciente estudio de Madore et al (2020), donde se halló que realizar dos o más actividades digitales al mismo empeora la atención de los individuos y genera fallos en la memoria. En este sentido, los avances tecnológicos han facilitado a los individuos mantenerse conectados de manera constante.…”