Question

Children whose minds wander might have sharper brains, a research suggests.

A study has found that people who appear to be often distracted (走神) have more “working memory”, giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and control it cleverly.

Children at school need this type of memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks, such as following teachers’ instructions or remembering dictated (听写的) sentences. During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one simple task during which researchers kept asking if their minds were wandering. At the end, volunteers measured their working memory capacity (容量) by their ability to remember a series of letters mixed with simple maths questions.

Daniel Levinson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said that those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks”, but their performance did not suffer.

The results, published online in the journal Psychological Science, appear to confirm former research that found working memory allows humans to deal with multiple thoughts at the same time.

Dr Jonathan Smallwood, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, said, “What this study seems to suggest is that, when surroundings for the task aren’t very difficult, people with additional working memory capacity use them effectively to think about other things besides what they’re doing.”

Working memory capacity is also associated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ scores. Dr Smallwood added: “Our results suggest the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life – when they are on the bus, when they are cycling to work, when they are in the shower – are probably supported by working memory.”

1.During the study, the researchers asked the volunteers to _______.

A. solve some difficult maths problems

B. retell some dictated sentences

C. follow the teacher’s instructions

D. carry out one simple task

2.The underlined word “suffer” in the fourth paragraph probably means _______.

A. become worse B. settle down

C. experience pain D. run out

3.According to the study, working memory _______.

A. prevents people from remembering dictated sentences

B. causes people’s minds to wander more easily

C. allows people to consider more things at the same time

D. leads to people’s worse performance during work

4.What’s the text mainly about?

A. How the working memory works in the daily life.

B. Wandering minds might have brighter brains.

C. Why people’s minds wander while working.

D. Working ability can be improved by wandering minds.

Answer 1