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. *** A major gap in our current understanding is predicting which difficulties will turn out to be "desirable" (rather than just distracting). The current proposal takes what we know about fundamental mechanisms of cognitive control and selective attention, and how different kinds of information are processed in sequence in the brain, to make better predictions about what kinds of task difficulties should produce "desirable" (enhancing) effects on later memory. It is proposed that "difficulty" is not a task-wide concept, but has to relate to particular interference effects on specific processing stages. This proposal uses a combination of behavioural, electrophysiological and eye movement data to precisely study moment-to-moment fluctuations of attentional control, and how this affects memory encoding.*** Understanding how these basic underlying cognitive mechanisms interact to produce enhanced memory during more difficult or challenging performance would make a strong contribution to both basic and applied research fields. These findings will help to unify basic theories across a range of cognitive psychology. Beyond basic research, this work would benefit education and training sectors, giving a strong grounding for developing applied approaches to enhanced learning methods.