Anticipating your own performance at work or school may hinder your ability to remember what happened before your presentation, a study from the University of Waterloo has found.
The study’s findings also suggest that the presence of an audience may be an important factor that contributes to this pre-performance memory deficit.
“Performance anticipation could weaken memory because people tend to focus on the details of their upcoming presentation instead of paying attention to information that occurs before their performance,” says lead author Noah Forrin, a postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at Waterloo. “People who experience performance anxiety may be particularly likely to experience this phenomenon.”
Read the complete article from University of Waterloo here: Anticipating performance can hinder memoryThe full text journal article from the Journal of Memory and Language can be found here: Wait for it… performance anticipation reduces recognition memory
The New York Times ran this article in its "Fashion and Style" section on the anxiety that can be caused by the "typing awareness indicator"- that little gray bubble with the ellipses that pops up on your iPhone while the person on the other end of your text message is writing a response. Although this article does not describe an experiment, it is such a rich topic for experimentation!
Read the article from the New York Times here: Bubbles Carry a Lot of Weight
People who feel intimidated by math may be less able to understand messages about genetically modified foods and other health-related information, according to researchers.
The researchers found that math anxiety led to a decrease in comprehension for people who read statistics in a message about genetically modified foods, while an increase in skills in math and a confidence in those skills led to better comprehension.
Read the complete article from Penn State News here:
Math anxiety factors into understanding genetically modified food messages
