Attention and Memory Improvement

One purpose of the present chapter is to question the extent to which memory complaints center on the appropriate mechanism. I contend that a substantial percentage of memory complaints has little to do with memory but rather is due to faulty attentional allocation. This position can be defended on grounds that the human information-processing system is limited in its capacity to process environmental information, thus necessitating selective processing of stimuli available to an observer. Should selective processing be misdirected away from a source of to-be-remembered information, that information will not be encoded into the memory system and will subsequently be unavailable to retrieval efforts, not because of faulty storage or retrieval but instead due to a failure to register the information in the first place. Such a fate may await not only information that is unattended by failure to direct processing resources accordingly but also information that is not fully attended due to its habitual, or automatically processed, nature. In other words, information that is processed automatically is unlikely to be recalled at a later time because of insufficient attentional allocation at initial exposure.