Cognitive Mechanisms of Desirable Difficulty for Memory

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The concept of "desirable difficulty" – the idea that making a task more difficult during learning can produce better memory later on – has become a strong focus for both basic researchers and practitioners who want to apply cognitive principles to real-life educational settings. From a pure research perspective, this question is also extremely important, as it sits at the intersection of several large and fundamental fields in cognitive science (selective attention, long term memory, and cognitive control/divided attention). A solution to why most kinds of difficulty lead to interference and poorer later memory (a typical cost of divided attention or distraction), but in some circumstances lead to enhanced encoding and better subsequent memory for in-the-moment difficult events (so-called "desirable difficulty"), would be valuable to many areas of research.