Relationship Between Divided Attention and Recall

Abstract

Memory and attention are considered to be important cognitive functions and depend on each other. Attention is considered to be important for recall of information; in other words, it is a pre-requisite for information to be registered in memory. A total of 45 participants were recruited for the study. Equal number of males and females were recruited. The mean age of the participants was 19.3 years. The primary and the competent task was administered on the participants. The primary task was to recall the stimulus and the secondary task was to copy the stimulus. The participants were asked to start with the concurrent task where they were asked to copy the geometrical shapes. The stimulus for recall was in English, L2 of the participants. All participants had native like proficiency in the second language. Each stimulus set had 5 items and there were four such stimulus sets. The mean scores were derived and the participants were divided into two groups based on whether their scores were above the mean or below the mean. The first sub group comprising of 14 participants secured a mean score of 11 and the second sub group comprising of 31 participants secured a mean score of 8. The scores on competent task were also determined and the correlation was carried out and the rs was positive but less for the first subgroup and the rs was negative but high for the second group; thus, showing that attention was pivotal for recall.