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With the explosion of digital media and technologies, scholars, educators and the public have become increasingly vocal about the role that an 'attention economy' has in our lives1. The rise of the current digital culture coincides with longstanding scientific questions about why humans sometimes remember and sometimes forget, and why some individuals remember better than others2-6. Here we examine whether spontaneous attention lapses-in the moment7-12, across individuals13-15 and as a function of everyday media multitasking16-19-negatively correlate with remembering. Electroencephalography and pupillometry measures of attention20,21 were recorded as eighty young adults (mean age, 21.7 years) performed a goal-directed episodic encoding and retrieval task22. Trait-level sustained attention was further quantified using task-based23 and questionnaire measures24,25. Using trial-to-trial retrieval data, we show that tonic lapses in attention in the moment before remembering, assayed by posterior alpha power and pupil diameter, were correlated with reductions in neural signals of goal coding and memory, along with behavioural forgetting. Independent measures of trait-level attention lapsing mediated the relationship between neural assays of lapsing and memory performance, and between media multitasking and memory. Attention lapses partially account for why we remember or forget in the moment, and why some individuals remember better than others. Heavier media multitasking is associated with a propensity to have attention lapses and forget.
Fluctuations in spontaneous states of preparatory attention might help to account for fundamental puzzles in neuroscience and behavioural science regarding why humans sometimes remember and sometimes forget, why some cognitively healthy individuals remember better than others and why memory varies as a function of engagement with the modern media landscape. To examine links between attention, goal coding and episodic remembering within individuals, and how they correlate with individual differences and media multitasking (MMT), participants completed a goal-directed episodic memory task during which electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry measurements were obtained (Extended Data Fig. 1). Participants also completed separate trait-level questionnaires and a sustained attention task.
We first leveraged retrieval data to investigate whether and how lapses of attention in the moment before remembering correlate with neural signals of goal coding and memory, and behavioural forgetting. Pre-stimulus tonic increases in posterior alpha power from EEG, an expression of release from top-down inhibitory control, and pre-stimulus tonic decreases in pupil diameter from pupillometry, an expression of...