University of Houston psychologist reveals how distraction breaks memory
It’s about focus, not storage
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University of Houston Associate Professor of Psychology Benjamin Tamber-Rosenau explains the science of memory - why older memories persist while new information is quicky forgotten.
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You’re in the kitchen, baking a cake, and the recipe calls for two cups of sugar. By the time you choose between the brown and white sugar, you’ve forgotten how much you need, and you have to check the recipe again. That’s a failure of working memory—the mental workspace that lets you hold and use information for the task at hand. Meanwhile, you’re effortlessly singing the lyrics to a 90’s ballad. How can you remember every word of an old song but not something you read seconds ago?
According to University of Houston associate professor of psychology Benjamin Tamber-Rosenau, the key is working memory consolidation – the process of protecting the information you just perceived from distraction, even though you might not aim to remember it in the longer term – and turning to a new task too quickly prevents that.
“It is not well understood what cognitive processes are needed for consolidation. The current study aimed to address this gap by elaborating the consolidation of perceptual information from vision into working memory, with particular focus on whether this consolidation is local to memory storage systems or is instead dependent on central executive processing,” reports Tamber-Rosenau and his colleagues in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. “Our results showed that premature shifting to new tasks disrupts memory consolidation primarily because of demands on central executive processing, not on the storage systems themselves.”
For the research, student participants from UH were asked to remember short strings of letters or very specific shades of colors. Each task required turning perceived information into working memories.
The researchers tested whether a decision task, presented very quickly after the memory items or after a short delay, interferes more with consolidation when it uses the same type of memory or a different one—for example, asking if visual memories are more disrupted by visual decisions or verbal decisions. They found that what disrupted working memory consolidation was making an immediate decision, regardless of the type of decision being made.
"Thus, consolidation is exclusively a function of central processing,” said Tamber-Rosenau, who has a history of human brain and cognition research focusing on attention and working memory.
The research was led by recent UH Ph.D. graduate Brandon J. Carlos in collaboration with recent UH Ph.D. graduate Lindsay A. Santacroce and was mentored by Tamber-Rosenau.
In practice
Based on the research, here are tips that might improve your short-term memory:
· Don’t multitask: If you want to remember something, even for just seconds or minutes, give it your full attention for a few seconds before doing anything else. Interruptions, especially in the first second or so, can break the process of turning what you just saw into a memory you can use to guide your actions.
· Avoid immediately switching tasks: Don’t look at your phone right after reading or hearing something important!
Journal
Attention Perception & Psychophysics
Article Title
Does working memory consolidation rely on central processing?
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