Concentration hampers simple tasks

December 6, 2004 | Source: [email protected]

University of Cambridge researchers have used functional MRI brain imaging to show that thinking too hard about simple actions interferes with the learning process.

Scientists already knew that consciously trying too hard to learn can cause trouble. In this study, researchers watched the brain activity of people who were putting deliberate effort into mastering a challenge (they explicitly knew a pattern existed in the challenge) and compared it with activity in people who were learning without consciously trying (implicit learning). At the end of the test, those who weren’t looking for a pattern completed the task with a reaction time that was about 40 milliseconds faster than those who were looking, suggesting that the former had learned the pattern more effectively.

The brain imaging detected a notable boost in the activity of the right frontal lobe in people who were trying to learn the pattern. The decision-making abilities of the frontal lobes are normally employed during sophisticated thought or learning, but this conscious processing might actually inhibit the automatic learning of simpler tasks.