Cognitive Mechanisms of Desirable Difficulty for Memory

“理想难度”的概念--在学习过程中增加任务难度可以在以后产生更好的记忆--已经成为基础研究人员和希望将认知原理应用于现实生活教育环境的实践者的强烈关注。从纯研究的角度来看，这个问题也非常重要，因为它位于认知科学中几个大的基本领域（选择性注意，长期记忆和认知控制/分散注意）的交叉点。为什么大多数类型的困难会导致干扰和更差的后期记忆（分散注意力或分心的典型代价），但在某些情况下会导致增强编码和更好的后续记忆（所谓的“理想困难”），这对许多研究领域都是有价值的。

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.