Too much focus can impair certain types of learning, researchers find

Alexandra Decker  was breezing through her multiple-choice driving exam when she realized the correct answer was always the longest and most detailed - an insight she may have overlooked if her attention was trained on the questions themselves. "If I had been focused on just the lesson material and choosing the right answer," she says, "I might not have picked up on that pattern." Decker is a post-doctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and a former graduate student in the labs of  Amy Finn  and  Katherine Duncan  - both associate professors in the University of Toronto's department of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science. What Decker experienced was our ability to learn secondary or non-targeted information when our attention on the primary or targeted information lapses - the subject of a paper that she and fellow co-lead authors  Michael Dubois  published recently in in the journal  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review  (Duncan and Finn were co-authors). "We experience attentional lapses all the time and, generally, they're considered a bad thing," says Decker, who worked on the study before joining MIT. "But we wanted to know whether being too focused on a learning goal might not be a good thing and whether attentional lapses can broaden our attention and enable us to take in more information from our environment." What the researchers found was that study participants demonstrated heightened learning of non-targeted information when their attention to targeted information lapsed.