Published this week in the journal PNAS<\/em>, a research team led by psychology professor John McDonald and doctoral student John Gaspar used EEG technology to determine that while ‘high-capacity’ individuals (those who perform well on memory tasks) are able to suppress distractors, ‘low-capacity’ individuals are unable to<\/strong> suppress them in time to prevent them from grabbing their attention.<\/p>\n “Distraction is a leading cause of injury and death in driving and other high-stakes environments, and has been associated with attentional deficits, so these results have important implications,” says McDonald, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience.<\/p>\n The study is linked to two previous papers in 2009 and 2014 in which McDonald’s research team showed that when people search the visual world for a particular object, the brain has distinct mechanisms for both locking attention onto relevant information and for suppressing irrelevant information.<\/p>\n The study is the first to relate these specific visual-search mechanisms to memory and show that the suppression mechanism is absent in individuals with low memory capacity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Simon Fraser University\u00a0media release: A new study by Simon Fraser University researchers has found that differences in an individual’s working memory capacity correlate with the brain’s ability to… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18819"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18839,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18819\/revisions\/18839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"schizophrenia](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/schizophrenia-memory-loss.jpg\")
A new study by Simon Fraser University researchers has found that differences in an individual’s working memory capacity correlate with the brain’s ability to actively ignore distraction<\/strong>.<\/p>\n