Mental Multitasking Activity

Think you can read while you're distracted? Try it when the distraction is coming from inside your own mind with this interactive experiment!

If you are color blind, try this pictographic alternative.

Selective Reading Challenge

Below you'll see an image with alternating lines of bold and regular text. Read ONLY the text in bold, and ignore everything else.

Selective Reading.JPG

Were you able to keep your attention just on the bold lines of text? If not, what got through? Now try going back and reading the material again - this time, read all the text, not just the bold lines. Are you surprised by what you missed the first time around?

What Was That About?

The "Mental Multitasking" activity you did was a version of a famous procedure called the "Stroop test," named after the scientist who discovered it. The Stroop test illustrates what happens when one mental activity interferes with another. For people who are very practiced readers, it's almost impossible to suppress reading the words. When this conflicts with the other mental activity you're trying to do - say the names of the colors - interference happens, and you're slower and likely to make mistakes. This finding shows how even simple tasks can be thrown off when we're trying to do two things at once. If you did the animal version of the test, you probably experienced something similar - the written word interfered with your ability to pay attention to the conflicting picture.

"Selective Reading" is a visual version of a famous attention phenomenon called the "cocktail party effect." If you're listening to one conversation while another is going on, you can filter out the irrelevant words. But while you do this, you're unconsciously analyzing the words you aren't listening to. We know this because certain words will jump into your awareness even when you aren't paying attention to them - especially your own name. If you've ever been in a situation like a crowded party and suddenly heard your name, you've experienced the cocktail party effect. And if your name was included in the "Selective Reading" text - you may have seen it, even though you weren't meaning to.

The cocktail party effect shows that we do "listen in" on an unconscious level even when we aren't paying attention. But researchers have found that we remember practically nothing of this unconsciously processed material. Once it's filtered out, it's gone. It follows that we really don't learn things just from having them in the background - as when we're in class but not really listening. Despite what you may have heard about "learning by osmosis" (or learning while you are asleep, or similar ideas), the science is clear - things that we aren't paying attention to don't stick in memory.