Alpha Meals

Past research suggests that our ability to recall information increases when atypical items are presented within otherwise homogeneous sets. We investigated whether this effect applied to performance on practical, everyday tasks. In a computer-simulated restaurant scenario, participants acted as virtual servers, delivering “plates of food orders” to tables set up in different “rooms.” Plate destination was communicated using either a distinctive alphanumeric code or a homogeneous numeric code, both of which indicated the room and table number for delivery of food orders. We examined accuracy of plate delivery when two (low load) or three (high load) coded assignments were given per delivery trial. As expected, performance declined from the low- to high-load condition. Importantly, performance declined less with alphanumeric compared with all-numeric communication of assignments. Results suggest that increasing the distinctiveness of assignments, by using alphanumeric codes, can boost performance in real-life situations to significantly improve memory-related task performance, particularly when cognitive load is taxed.