WASHINGTON -- Your parents were rig...

WASHINGTON -- Your parents were right, don't application of mind with the TV on.

Multitasking may be a necessity in today's fast-paced world, unless new research shows distractions affect the way commonalty learn, making the knowledge they gain harder to use later.

The consideration in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also provides a ball of thread as to why it happens.

"What's strange is that even if you can learn while distracted, it changes by what means you learn to make it les efficient and useful," said Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, observes Angeles.

That could affect a accident of young people. A research by the Kaiser Family Foundation last year place third-graders through 12th- graders devot upon average, nearly 6oe hours by day to TV and videos, music, video games and computer

HABIT'S NO WAY TO LEARN

As Poldrack explains it, the brain learns in brace ways. One, called declarative learning, involves the medial temporal lobe and deals with learning active facts that can be recalled and used with great flexibility. The other involving the striatum, is called habit learning.

In learning a phone number you can simply memorize it, using declarative learning, and can then recall it whenever povertyed Poldrack explained.

A inferior way to learn it is from habit, "punch it in 1000 times, then calm if you don't remember it consciously, you can advance to the phone and puncheon it in," he said.

Memorizing is a allotment more useful, he pointed without "If you use the habit classification you have to be at a phone to re-create the movements"

The enigma Poldrack said, is that the couple types of learning seem to be competing with each other, and when someone is distracted, habit learning strike one as beings to take over from declarative learning.

"We have to multitask in today's world, however you have to be aware of this," he said. "When a kid is trying to learn just discovered concepts, new information, distraction is going to be bad, it's going to impair their ability to learn."

DISTRACTIONS 'ALMOST ALWAYS' BAD

That doesn't mean he thinks a silent environment is essential -- music can help in learning because it can make the individual happier, he said.

unless in general, "distraction is almost always a bad thing."

Poldrack and his colleagues used brain imaging to research the parts of the brain in use when 14 nation were learning.

Participants were asked to predict the weather after receiving a repeated establish of cues. In part of the learning, researchers added a inferior task where participants had to withhold a running mental count of high tones that they heard, thus adding an component part of distraction.

The inferences showed that when doing single-task learning, the brain used the region associated with declarative memory, while the habit memory region was associated with dual-task learning.

The dual-task learning did not affect the participants' ability to predict weather at the time, however it reduced their knowledge about the task in a follow-up session.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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