A-10-Shun!

My friend, Monica and I were chatting one time at the lobby. We were laughing about her cheesy joke and giggled like there’s nothing for tomorrow. We were so caught in laughter when my other friend came to ask about the deadline of our paper in Landscape Architecture. Oops, it hit me that I haven’t even thought about it the entire time. Well, I told myself that I can probably get it done in a wee once I sit on it. When that person-who-reminded-about-the-paper left, I turned back to Monica. So excited to continue laughing my heart out loud, I just found myself trying to remember where we were at.

Has this happened to you before?

Part of our day to day activities is communicating with other people. We listen, we observe, we interact. Sometimes we pay too much attention, other times we don’t. Sometimes we can still remember the details of the conversation we had in one instance after a day or two or even longer. Some, we remember after several days or weeks or months or even longer. Some, we suddenly forget some details, if not the whole meat of our interactions.

How about an instance where you were in the middle of a crowd? What would you do? More often than not, you will search for someone whom you know.  This search is guided by the information which you draw from your memory.  Thus the focus of your attention is drawn to the physical features of the people you meet. When you recognize someone whom you think you know, you will draw your attention to it and the searching is guided by your memory.

These situations aforementioned exemplify how attention and memory interacts with each other.

Attention, together with inhibition, is the most elementary among the five basic cognitive control functions (task management, planning, monitoring, and coding) identified by Smiths and Jonides (1999). “Attention and inhibition refers to the ability to focus attention on relevant and away from irrelevant, information…” (Koch, 2009). Attending several tasks at a time is possible. This means that we can apportion the attentional resources but would be limited. We can only attend to things which choose to focus, thus leaving others unattended.

Based on my observation and personal experience, when we focus our attention into something, there is a higher chance that the information will be stored in our memory. Memory, according to Tulving (2000b) and Tulving & Craik (2000), “...is the means by which we retain and draw on our past experiences to use that information in the present” (as cited in Sternberg, 2010).

The interaction between memory and attention has long been recognized yet it the relationship is somehow vague.  Studies are conducted to understand the parts of the brain which function according to different activities.  According to the review by Chun & Turk-Browne (2007), areas in the brain which are important for memory are involved in tasks requiring attention. Among these are the hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe structures. Memory, on the other hand, affects the frontal-parietal networks which are involved in spatial orienting, an aspect of attention.

Memory and attention go hand-in-hand. Memory acts as one of the guides where a person focuses his attention to. And to acquire that memory, for instance, by learning, attention is needed though we cannot discount the other factors, such as distractions, which affect the process of learning (encoding).

Chun, M. M., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2007, March 26). Interactions between attention and memory. (K. Tanaka, & T. Watanabe, Eds.) Retrieved September 23, 2011, from Science Direct: http://www.sciencedirect.com

Koch, S. (2009). Cognitive control in motion: The regulatory function of approach and avoidance movements.

Sternberg, R. J. (2011). Discovering Cognitive Psychology. Singapore: Cengage Learning Asia Pte. Ltd.

-kesi