Bad for the memory: media multitasking

Christine Albert studied German linguistics and literature as well as Scandinavian studies at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg. She is currently doing a traineeship at Hubert Burda Media and is writing, among other things, for

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On the couch, it looks the same for many in the evening: a movie is playing, while people are surfing the net and one or the other text message is sent to friends. Such media multitasking may be good against boredom - it is more likely to be detrimental to the memory.

While some people can still name all of Europe's capitals years after leaving school, others no longer know what lunch was the day before. And while some days we can perfectly reproduce the contents of a book, on others we cannot remember the end of a particular film. Scientists have investigated where these differences come from.

As they report in the journal "Nature", pupil movements and brain waves make it possible to predict whether someone will remember a certain thing or not. It therefore seems to be more detrimental to memory if you frequently do media multitasking, i.e. watch TV and surf the Internet at the same time.

Pupillary responses and brain waves recorded

In their experiment, the scientists at Stanford University in the United States carried out various memory exercises with 80 test subjects between the ages of 18 and 26 years.

Meanwhile, their pupil reactions and brain waves were recorded in an electroencephalogram (EEG), especially the so-called alpha activity. "Increased alpha activity in the back of the skull has been linked to inattention, wandering, and distractibility," said psychologist and lead author Kevin Madore.

In fact, a recent study by the Leibniz Institute for Labor Research at TU Dortmund University (IfADo) has proven this connection. "We also know that constrictions in pupil diameter - especially before performing various tasks - are related to performance degradations such as slower reaction times and wandering thoughts," added Madore.

The researchers also measured subjects' ability to remain alert by examining how well they were able to see a gradual change in an image. In addition, they asked about their media multitasking habits, i.e. how often they watched TV and texted or surfed the Internet at the same time.

The result: those subjects with a shorter attention span and more intensive media multitasking behavior also performed worse in the memory exercises. However, the authors emphasize that this is initially a correlation, not a causality.

Nonetheless, the hypothesis that media multitasking has an impact on memory, explains psychologist and cognitive scientist Simon Hanslmayr from the University of Glasgow in an independent classification of the study. Overall, the correlation shown is a relationship that has not yet been described.

Attention in remembering

Another merit of the study is that it examines the role of attention in remembering, says Hanslmayr: "We already know a lot about how attention directs the storage of information, but little about how attention influences the retrieval of this information."

The authors could now have analyzed the subjects' attention fluctuations and, with the help of EEG and pupil recordings, could determine whether someone remembers or not.

Remembering is an ability that people use and need every day in order to function at all, says Hanslmayr. Diseases that affect memory, such as Alzheimer's, have shown how fundamentally this is.

Willingness to turn off distraction

Indeed, the study's authors hope that their research will contribute to a better understanding of such diseases.

In conclusion, the scientists emphasize that memory depends to a large extent on goal-directed cognition: We have to be ready to remember, to turn our attention on and off, and to have a memory goal in mind - factors that acted and determined before actually remembering whether you can activate your memory.

Targeted interventions are conceivable for this. As an example, the researchers imagine wearable eye sensors that use the pupil size to detect in real time whether the wearer is careless and then send a corresponding signal. (approx / dpa)

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