Reduction of environmental distraction to facilitate cognitive performance

Imagine explaining a statistics problem to a student while your colleague at the back of the room is frantically waving to get your attention. Or imagine reporting to a police officer on the street what happened during a witnessed mugging, while seeing traffic buzz by and hearing snippets of conversations from passers-by. Environmental distractions can have an impact on cognitive performance, whether this concerns solving a mathematical problem, maintaining a conversation, or retrieving an experienced event from memory. Glenberg et al. (1998) were the first to systematically explore the relationship between memory, environmental distraction, and behavioral control of distraction through gaze aversion and eye-closure. In a series of experiments, they found that people are more likely to avert their gaze when trying to answer more difficult questions about general and autobiographical information. Moreover, they found that instructed eye-closure resulted in better performance on a word recall task, whereas watching a silent movie resulted in poorer performance. Inspired by this work, Wagstaff et al. (2004) and Perfect et al. (2008) examined whether instructed eye-closure could also improve recall of events. In a series of studies, they found that eye-closure substantially improved the amount and accuracy of information reported about witnessed events.