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Too much willpower leads to memory loss

It is a long-held assumption, and prevalent in many educational institutions, that those who exercise self-control do better at school and later in life. This relates to studies conducted by the psychologist Walter Mischel who experimented with tempting children with sweets (the “Stanford marshmallow experiment” can be read in more detail here).

Writing in The Guardian, Mo Costandi reports that this association between willpower and better learning might not actually be true. In fact, the reverse may be happening: those who exercise strong willpower may actually have worse memory and recognition than those who are a little more impulsive.

This alternate pathway is based on some recent laboratory studies. Costandi explains that self-control (or “response inhibition”) is assessed through what is known as the ‘Go/ no–go’ procedure. Experiments based around this test consist of study participants viewing various stream of sensory cues. Each participant must respond to the majority of the cues by pressing a button.

The exception is with a set of cues where people are supposed to withhold the button pressing action. These are termed “no-go” responses. The more successfully a person is in correctly no acting to a specific cue, then the greater their self-control ism supposed to be.

Two researchers – Yu-Chin Chiu and Tobias Egner of Duke University – have undertaken studies that suggest success in self-control actually impairs memory. The findings are captured in a paper published in the journal Psychological Science.

With the North Carolina study, study participants carried out a ‘Go/ no–go’ study where faces were shown. With the study the researchers tested the ability of people to ability to recognize the faces used in the experiment. The end result was that the subjects’ memory for the faces seen during the “no–go” trials were less good.

The inference is that response inhibition (that is “willpower”) competes with memory encoding, leading to a reduced capacity to remember. Further studies were conducted and functional magnetic resonance imaging deployed to review brain patterns (which Costandi expands upon.) The results were similar.

Given that these results alter long-established thinking other trials will need to be conducted to see if the findings can be verified. At this stage the results are interesting and revaltionary

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Written By

Dr. Tim Sandle is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for science news. Tim specializes in science, technology, environmental, business, and health journalism. He is additionally a practising microbiologist; and an author. He is also interested in history, politics and current affairs.

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