The Hindu : International : Where focus is everything

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jul 26, 2006

International

International

Where focus is everything

Distractions affect learning

WASHINGTON: Your parents were right, don't study with the TV on. New research shows distractions affect the way people learn, making knowledge they gain harder to use later on.

The study, that has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a clue as to why it happens. "What's new is that even if you can learn while distracted, it changes how you learn to make it less efficient and useful," said Russell A. Poldrack, a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

As Prof. Poldrack explains it, the brain learns in two different ways. One, called declarative learning, involves the medial temporal lobe and deals with learning active facts that can be recalled. The second, involving the striatum, is called habit learning.

For instance, in learning a phone number you can simply memorise it, using declarative learning, and can then recall it.

A second way to learn it is by habit: "Punch it in 1,000 times, then even if you don't remember it consciously, you can go to the phone and punch it in."

Memorising is more useful. "If you use the habit system, you have to be at a phone to recreate the movements."

The problem, Prof. Poldrack said, is that the two types of learning seem to be competing with each other, and when distracted, habit learning takes over from declarative learning.

What the researchers did was to use brain imaging to study the parts of the brain in use when 14 people were learning. They were asked to predict the weather after receiving a repeated set of cues. The participants also had to keep a running mental count of high tones that they heard, thus causing distraction. The results showed that when doing single-task learning, the brain used the region associated with declarative memory, while the habit memory region was associated with dual-task learning.

The dual-task learning did not affect the participants' ability to predict weather at the time, but it reduced their knowledge about the task during a follow-up session.

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