study habits suck these days...and we can prove it!

[acroyear]

LiveScience.com - TV Makes Learning Less Efficient:

Your parents were right, don't study with the TV on. Multitasking may be a necessity in today's fast-paced world, but new research shows distractions affect the way people learn, making the knowledge they gain harder to use later on.

The study, in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also provides a clue as to why it happens.

"What's new is that even if you can learn while distracted, it changes how you learn to make it less efficient and useful,'' said Russell A. Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

That could affect a lot of young people. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation last year found third-graders through 12th-graders devoted, on average, nearly 6 1/2 hours per day to TV and videos, music, video games and computers.

As Poldrack explains it, the brain learns in two different ways. One, called declarative learning, involves the medial temporal lobe and deals with learning active facts that can be recalled and used with great flexibility. The second, involving the striatum, is called habit learning.

For instance, in learning a phone number you can simply memorize it, using declarative learning, and can then recall it whenever needed, Poldrack explained.

A second way to learn it is by habit, "punch it in 1,000 times, then even if you don't remember it consciously, you can go to the phone and punch it in,'' he said.

Memorizing is a lot more useful, he pointed out. "If you use the habit system, you have to be at a phone to recreate the movements.''

The problem, Poldrack said, is that the two types of learning seem to be competing with each other, and when someone is distracted, habit learning seems to take over from declarative learning.

"We have to multitask in today's world, but you have to be aware of this,'' he said. "When a kid is trying to learn new concepts, new information, distraction is going to be bad, it's going to impair their ability to learn.''

ok, i'll go back to watching tv right now while i read this book.  Let me know if the radio's too loud.

Comments

[fiona64.livejournal.com]

ok, i'll go back to watching tv right now while i read this book. Let me know if the radio's too loud.

This made me laugh, because I'm able to concentrate better with music in the background. It blocks out all of the other environmental noise, and I don't even really hear the music most of the time.

My mother, who has to have absolute quiet to concentrate, could never understand how I could do homework with a record playing (there I go again, showing my age ...)

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

depends on what you're concentrating on and how...

a study done back in the 90s showed that, for two groups of computer programmers (though still college students), both managed to "get the job done" when given a certain programming task. the programmers were considered relatively equal in ability by their programming abilities technically, so the only difference between two groups were that half program while listening to music in the background, the others in a room attempting to keep silent - no cross-programmer contact was allowed during the exercise.

the trick was that there was a "short cut" approach that could do the job in less than 75 lines of code (compared to the easily derived algorithm that would have taken about 400).

those programmers that did NOT have music in the background thought up the shorter algorithm in higher numbers (like almost 3 times as many) as those with their choice of music playing on headphones.

so again, the music does interfere with certain processes of creativity, while at the same time has little impact on others.

it really all comes down to the truth of "7 + or - 2" - the limits of short-term memory. music in the background may be able to block an audible distraction noise from taking out 3 or 4 of those concentration "points" (those 3 or 4 being enough to blow concentration and "the zone" entirely), but it still uses up 1 or 2 on its own - the brain IS listening.

when just pounding out rote cut-n-paste code (applying a change across the codebase), i can do the music thing.

when writing a new feature for a web application, the music is off. i have to deal with 10 different languages to add a single feature (given that its got the Ajax stuff, so its Java, CSS, HTML, JSPs, 3 different dialects of XML, Javascript (including Java-generated Javascript), and of course, the inevitable browser differences) - 10 +- 3 during a zone moment. the music itself becomes a distraction at that point...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

clarifying that experiment - the original hypothesis was that the programmers who listened to music made more mistakes, that the distraction impacted code quality from a correctness view.

it turns out it didn't - both sides had the same number of programmers who made mistakes.

but it was the short cut, the "optimal" solution vs the long-slug, that they discovered was different.

[fiona64.livejournal.com]

In fairness and self-disclosure, I must also confess the following:

I didn't get a driver's license until I was 30 (I honestly hadn't needed one previously). When I first started driving, I couldn't have any music, etc., going in the car as I needed to focus on so many things all at the same time. Eventually, I was able to have classical or other instrumental music going, but nothing with vocals. Once driving became more familiar, I was able to introduce vocal music. When it gets really "hairy" traffic-wise, I still turn off the music.

So, I do get what you're talking about when it comes to "depends on the function." I hadn't thought about this myself until you amplified your own experience. When I was doing assigned reading for school, etc., I could focuse better with music *on.* Being a new driver was a different matter.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

i don't have a problem driving when the music is playing.

i have a problem driving when something in the music system goes wrong!

my first accident was because i was distracted trying to keep my car's tape deck from eating a tape.

but in that, its the same "distracted driving" that's leading to all the hands-free-cell-phone laws, which don't really solve the problem because its concentration on the whole, not hands on the wheel...