Memory failure predicted by attention lapsing and media multitasking

With the explosion of digital media and technologies, commentators have become increasingly vocal about the role that an ‘attention economy’ plays in our lives.(1) The rise of today’s digital culture coincides with longstanding scientific questions about why humans sometimes remember and sometimes forget, and why some individuals remember better than others.(2–6) We examined whether spontaneous attention lapses –– in the moment(7–12), across individuals(13–15), and as a function of everyday media multitasking(16–19) –– negatively relate to remembering. EEG+pupillometry measures of attention(20–21) were recorded as 80 young adults performed a goal-directed episodic encoding and retrieval task(22). Trait-level sustained attention was further quantified via task-based(23) and questionnaire measures(24–25). Leveraging trial-to-trial retrieval data, we show that tonic lapses of attention in the moment prior to remembering, assayed by posterior alpha power and pupil diameter, related to reductions in neural signals of goal coding and memory, along with behavioral forgetting. Independent measures of trait-level attention lapsing mediated the relationship between neural assays of lapsing and memory performance, and between media multitasking and memory. Attention lapses partially account for why we remember or forget in the moment, and why some individuals remember better than others. Heavier media multitasking is associated with a propensity to suffer attention lapses and forgetting.