Avoid Distraction!

Experiment:

• distraction during learning can be harmful, even if the distraction doesn’t seem to harm students’ immediate performance on their tasks
• when they were asked afterward to describe the general rules for that trial, they did much worse
• distracted-> they learned through a half-conscious system of “habit memory,”
• when they were undistracted, they used the declarative-memory system (information is then more flexible—people are more likely to be able to draw analogies and extrapolate from it)