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)

“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.
• Multitaske...