Distraction has high impact on tasks with high cognitive load

When someone has loaded many information to their working memory, these information are not stored in their long term memory yet. When they're distracted, those information is somewhat lost.

This is the opposite to what happen when we have high perceptual load. Distraction has low impact on tasks with high perceptual load.

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References

Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology (p. 99).

As it turned out, the compatibility effect, thus the influence of the flanker, was the largest in the high working memory load condition. It is important to note that this is exactly what was expected but opposite to what was observed when perceptual load was manipulated.

Backlinks

• Example relationship of perceptual load and distraction in software engineering
  • In this example, I had to fill a lot of things in my working memory to debug the issue. Given that I'm unfamiliar with the codebase, most of the information are stored in my working memory. When I got distracted, I have lost the information I was analysing. Distraction has high impact on tasks with high cognitive load.