Effects of divided attention on memory for discourse.

摘要

The experiment described in this paper was designed to explore the cognitive processes that contribute to ordinary language use by testing the effects of divided attention on memory for discourse. One hundred and ten experimental subjects each listened to five different stories under various conditions of distraction, and then recalled the stories aloud. Their recall was recorded and analyzed for amount of information content and grammatical relationship to the original stimuli. Variation in recall under the different experimental conditions showed that divided attention reduces the amount of information remembered, but recall of exact form is not significantly different among conditions.