IMPROVE MEMORY BY PAYING ATTENTION

BY ZEHADI ALAM –  Most people want a better memory, especially us college students. It seems obvious that a cognitive improvement such as enhanced memory could only provide a net benefit. Learning would be more effective, decisions would be of higher quality, and navigating the challenges of life would be more manageable. Who would not want to experience the benefits of being able to retain and recall more information from going about their day and through deliberate learning? If this sounds appealing, then the good news is that there is a simple method to improve one’s memory. It involves no dietary changes, no listening to special audios, no electric shocks to the brain, and not even “memory exercises” (e.g. mnemonics). What is this simple technique to  retain significantly more than you have been otherwise? It is paying more attention. What follows will provide a conceptual understanding of memory, followed by an explanation of the relation between attention and memory from a cognitive psychology perspective.

Despite the colloquial usage of “memory” as a singular noun, it is far from being a single faculty. The brain has multiple memory systems (sensory, episodic, semantic, and procedural), which makes speaking precisely about what we mean when we talk about improving memory more significant. In this context, when we talk about having a better memory, we refer to declarative (explicit) memory, as opposed to procedural (implicit) memory. The notion of having declarative memory improved, in this context, means being able to better retrieve information stored in the brain. This storage refers to long-term memory. The information in long-term memory is retrieved into working memory. It is helpful to think of long-term memory as a vast library and working memory as a table—a workspace where one can hold and consciously manipulate information. Retrieving information from long-term memory into working memory would be analogous to retrieving a book from a shelf and bringing it to the table. Failing to remember would be analogous to not finding the book you are looking for. We commonly think that the reason we cannot remember something is because we are having retrieval issues, but there is another reason, which may play a more significant role: there is no memory available to be recalled (or no book that exists to be found in the first place, given our analogy).

For a memory to be recalled, it must at the very least exist. That requires successful encoding. Encoding happens when information from working memory gets transferred into long-term memory. A failure to properly encode information results in a failure to store that information as a memory. How does one succeed in encoding information? Repetition of information may come to mind, however, the latest evidence indicates that it is not enough to merely have items occupy working memory for a certain duration in order to head over to long-term memory. Properly encoding information requires sufficient processing of the information in working memory such that it leads to storage as a memory. There is a prominent model in cognitive psychology called Levels of Processing (LOP) theory, formulated by Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart in 1972, that serves to explain this notion. In a nutshell, the model explains that deeply processed information is encoded as a more robust memory than shallowly processed information. Deep processing refers to focusing on the meaning of a piece of information and making connections with existing learned information. Shallow processing refers to focusing on more superficial aspects of a piece of information, such as its visual or auditory characteristics. Deep processing of information requires attention to be directed at an item of information in working memory.

Returning to the previous analogy, working memory is like a table, in that it is a workspace which temporarily holds information. This table of working memory, however, has limited work space. According to a highly influential paper by psychologist George A. Miller, the capacity of working memory is restricted to seven plus or minus two items. This means that loading working memory with too many items can lead to existing items “falling off” without having a chance to be processed and encoded. This can be a problem for our declarative memory, since our working memory tends to be very susceptible to and occupied with distractions, which can displace items that we want to remember from working memory. Evidence for displacement of items in working memory by others comes from a 1965 study by Waugh and Norman. Participants were presented with sixteen digits. The sixteenth digit was called the probe digit, a digit that was previously presented at some point in the list. Participants had to recall and state the digit that came after the probe digit. High intervening digits between the probe digit and the sixteenth digit lead to poor recall performance. This is because the intervening items replaced early items in working memory. This is the danger that comes along with attempting to mentally manage too many things.

How do distractions affect processing of items not pushed out of working memory? As previously mentioned, deep information processing requires attention. Even if distractions are minimal enough to not overload working memory, we often still constantly switch our attention between distractions and relevant items. Attention by its nature is selective, and switching attention can be likened to moving a spotlight between multiple objects of focus. If the spotlight of attention is constantly taken away from important items in working memory, the processing of those items is severely impaired. They are likely to only undergo shallow processing as described by LOP theory. For example, if one is scrolling through Instagram in the middle of a lecture, they will tend to only process auditory characteristics of what the professor is saying, such as tone, pitch, and speed. Most of the semantic content (i.e. the meaning of what is being said) will be filtered out, which will restrain semantic encoding. The evidence for this comes from a 1953 study by Colin Cherry. In the study, participants were given a dichotic listening task. They wore a pair of headphones, which played one message in one ear and another message in the other ear. The participants had to focus their attention on one of the messages and repeat what they heard as they were listening. They had to ignore the other message. When the experiment was over and the participants were asked about the message they did not pay attention to, they could not explain the content of the message. This is because the ignored message was merely shallowly processed instead of deeply processed.

Despite the knowledge that a lack of undivided attention to items in working memory leads to a serious detriment to encoding, giving poor attention is unfortunately a very common behavior. Students are notorious for using nearly every opportunity they can to respond to texts and check social media in class. To be fair, there is very little grounds from a phenomenological perspective to realize that this kind of behavior is counterproductive. From a first-person standpoint, it feels very convincing that one is successfully managing and accomplishing more than they would if they were attending to only a single channel of information. This is because each of the tasks one is multitasking between usually require little cognitive effort. In conjunction with processing fluency, this leads to the false assumption that being able to maintain an independent comprehension of multiple items in working memory also enables one to retain all streams of information. Students who multitask may later be under the impression that they forgot certain things that the professor explained in class, but this would be a mistake. What would be true to say is that they did not learn to the point of having something to remember in the first place.

As we have no doubt experienced in many domains of life, certain kinds of remedies come from simple changes. In the case of memory, paying more attention to information and refraining from constantly switching between multiple objects of focus will enable one to better transfer information to long-term memory. This is because when one truly pays attention to something, they tend to automatically behave in ways that are beneficial to both the encoding and retrieval process. This includes anchoring the substance of what they are focusing on to the surrounding environmental context, making connections between ideas, and thinking more deeply about the information in general. Moving forward, just as we are encouraged to take handwritten notes over typed notes, we should be encouraged to pay full attention to one thing at a time over dividing our attention between multiple things. That way, when struggling to remember something, one will be assured that they are really experiencing problems with retrieval, as opposed to calling upon information that their mind does not even possess.