FriSem

Douglas Miller, PhD Student, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 2021 Fall First-Year Project Neuroscience Student

Title: Preparatory Attentions Effect on Successful Memory Encoding

Abstract: Memory is a fundamental part of the human experience. Every moment in one’s life involves encoding, retrieving, and forgetting memories. So, what makes memories more stable than others? Here we leverage EEG in an incidental encoding task (N=136 young adults with 113 included across analyses), to measure the effect of sustained attention variability in learning and memory in the presence or absence of distractors within an individual, between individuals, and as a function of real-world behaviors like media multitasking. Pre-goal tonic attention lapsing from posterior alpha power in the moment prior to learning in this context of episodic distraction was trending toward but not a significant predictor of memory strength. As predicted, distractor presence significantly impacted subsequent memory performance.