Increased associative interference under high cognitive load

Shira Baror,Moshe Bar

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-05722-w

Abstract

Associative processing is central for human cognition, perception and memory. But while associations often facilitate performance, processing irrelevant associations can interfere with performance, for example when learning new information. The aim of this study was to explore whether associative interference is influenced by contextual factors such as resources availability. Experiments 1–3 show that associative interference increases under high cognitive load. This result generalized to both long-term and short-term memory associations, and to both explicitly learned as well as incidentally learned associations in the linguistic and pictorial domains. Experiment 4 further revealed that attention to associative information can delay one’s perceptual processing when lacking resources. Taken together, when resources diminish associative interference increases, and additionally, processing novel and ambiguous information is hindered. These findings bare relevance to other domains as well (e.g., social, educational), in which increased load or stress may prompt an undesirable bias towards prior, misleading information.

Highlights

Associative processing is central for human cognition, perception and memory
We examine the influence of cognitive load on the processing of associations that are retained in short-term memory (STM) as well as in long-term memory (LTM; Exp. 1), associations that are incidentally learned in the linguistic (Exp. 2) and pictorial (Exp. 3) domains, and visual contextual associations (Exp. 4)
Recognition was carried using a two-alternative forced choice task (2AFC), in which participants were presented with a cue word that was learned with a paired word during the learning stage and were asked to determine between two alternative words which was learned as an association with the cue word

Summary

Introduction

Associative processing is central for human cognition, perception and memory. But while associations often facilitate performance, processing irrelevant associations can interfere with performance, for example when learning new information. Others have shown that working memory capacity is necessary for selectively avoiding distraction, demonstrating that when resources diminish, increased interference, rather than a reduction in interference, takes place, suggesting that employing executive functions to discard the distracting stimulus requires r esources[16,17]. To illuminate this discussion, here we probe the interaction between cognitive load and interference, and study this possible relation with regards to information carrying top-down associative information. We found that while activation of associations is not compromised by high cognitive load, associative interference increases under high load

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