Resisting distractions equals better memory
“Distractibility depends on one’s ability to focus on a current goal amidst irrelevant information,” says Kiran Vadaga, Vadaga, who is now a first-year master’s clinical psychology student, was the first to examine how much three types of ‘irrelevant information’ can interrupt a single task, while still an undergraduate.
Imagine you’re studying to ace a math exam. One type of irrelevant information would be unrelated to your goal (the newspaper on the table beside your math book). The second would be something that was previously a goal (the dirty dishes from the lunch you made before studying). Third, a habitual response that needs to be restrained (answering the phone while trying to study).
Each type affects memory performance in different ways. Vadaga and his supervisor at the centre, Psychology Professor Karen Li, set out to develop a means to determine which affects memory functioning the most.
“What we found was that an individual’s ability to resist distractors that were previous targets — the second type of irrelevant information — was positively associated with working memory,” says Vadaga. “In an everyday working memory task such as reading, implies that one’s reading efficiency is increased by the ability to disengage from previous goals.”
Long and short of it – ignore the dishes and bury your nose in those books.
In August, this research won Vadaga the poster competition for Life Sciences and Cognitive Sciences at the Rising Stars of Research (RSR) conference at the University of British Columbia, attended by 120 undergrads from Canada and Hong Kong.
The RSR prize adds to Vadaga’s growing string of successes. Earlier this year, he won the prize for best oral presentation at the Concordia Undergraduate Research Day. Currently, he holds a $17 500 Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Frederick Banting and Charles Best graduate scholarship, given to students in health-related fields deemed to have an exceptionally high potential for future research achievement and productivity.
His current research examines how distractibility affects memory performance in older adults.