Scientists from the Ural Federal University, along with colleagues from Germany, discovered that the amount of information a person can retain in their head depends on the ability to concentrate rather than selective attention. Research results published in the journal Behavioral Sciences.
According to scientists, the capacity of this type of working memory largely determines the success of studying, studying and solving any problem. The study involved 111 people who passed a cognitive test. They had to memorize and repeat numbers, letters, colored objects. For example, one of the tasks was to search for the letter L among the set of T.
It seems that while selective attention and working memory are independent processes, attentional control and working memory capacity are quite strongly related. Among other things, it turned out that cultural and linguistic influences have little effect on cognitive processes.
“There are many foreign studies on this subject. A feature of our work was the verification of patterns in the Russian sample. That is, we have proven that cultural and linguistic influences have little effect on cognitive processes. But the real innovation is that we additionally investigated the factor of selective attention: it turned out to be unrelated to working memory capacity. We put forward an argument in favor of the fact that there is still no link between the two processes,” the researchers said.