Memory failure predicted by attention lapsing and media multitasking

Kevin P. Madore (), Anna M. Khazenzon, Cameron W. Backes, Jiefeng Jiang, Melina R. Uncapher, Anthony M. Norcia and Anthony D. Wagner ()
Additional contact information
Kevin P. Madore: Stanford University
Anna M. Khazenzon: Stanford University
Cameron W. Backes: Stanford University
Jiefeng Jiang: Stanford University
Melina R. Uncapher: University of California, San Francisco
Anthony M. Norcia: Stanford University
Anthony D. Wagner: Stanford University

Nature, 2020, vol. 587, issue 7832, 87-91

Abstract: Abstract With the explosion of digital media and technologies, scholars, educators and the public have become increasingly vocal about the role that an ‘attention economy’ has in our lives1. The rise of the current digital culture coincides with longstanding scientific questions about why humans sometimes remember and sometimes forget, and why some individuals remember better than others2–6. Here we examine whether spontaneous attention lapses—in the moment7–12, across individuals13–15 and as a function of everyday media multitasking16–19—negatively correlate with remembering. Electroencephalography and pupillometry measures of attention20,21 were recorded as eighty young adults (mean age, 21.7 years) performed a goal-directed episodic encoding and retrieval task22. Trait-level sustained attention was further quantified using task-based23 and questionnaire measures24,25. Using trial-to-trial retrieval data, we show that tonic lapses in attention in the moment before remembering, assayed by posterior alpha power and pupil diameter, were correlated with reductions in neural signals of goal coding and memory, along with behavioural 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 have attention lapses and forget.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2870-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:587:y:2020:i:7832:d:10.1038_s41586-020-2870-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2870-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().