Managing Attention by Preparing to Forget

Abstract
In dynamic task environments, human operators must update their memory for what is true of the current situation. This updating depends on forgetting old information, and this forgetting in turn places constraints on how an item is encoded in the first place — the cognitive system must prepare to forget. Functional decay theory accurately, predicts how long this preparation takes — concentrated use of an item for about 5 sec requires an additional 1 sec for initial encoding. This quantitative prediction illustrates the potential of functional decay theory for evaluating cognitive workload.

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