Increased associative interference under high cognitive load.

ABSTRACT: Associative processing is central for human cognition, perception and memory. But while associations often facilitate performance, processing irrelevant associations can interfere with performance, for example when learning new information. The aim of this study was to explore whether associative interference is influenced by contextual factors such as resources availability. Experiments 1-3 show that associative interference increases under high cognitive load. This result generalized to both long-term and short-term memory associations, and to both explicitly learned as well as incidentally learned associations in the linguistic and pictorial domains. Experiment 4 further revealed that attention to associative information can delay one's perceptual processing when lacking resources. Take

SUBMITTER: Baror S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8811063 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature