https://www.chronicle.com/article/divided-attention/

“Heavy multitaskers are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”

Experiment - cognitive & memory tasks with distraction:

• Self-described multitaskers performed much worse than people who preferred to focus on single tasks.
• Multitaskers couldn’t perform better on any elements of the test
• Maybe chronic multitaskers are hyperdistractible people, but there’re worries that media multitasking might actually be destroying students’ capacity for reasoning

-> debate: should laptops be allowed in classrooms?

Attention:

• is generated by conscious effort
• is an unwilled effect of outside forces.

Our working-memory capacity:

• is limited to 7 units or fewer
• anxiousness/ fatigue/ presence of an attractive stranger -> even less

How to maximize it?

• You can  “chunk” information -> you can pack more material into one of those 7 units. (E.g. at the beginning to learn a code: each dit, dash = a separate chunk-> later already letters as chunks-> words ->whole phrases)
• You can also manage attention so that unwanted stimuli do not crowd the working memory.

Attention & distraction are entangled in:

• reasoning,
• working memory
• in the encoding of information into long-term memory.