The simplest way to state the relationship between attention and memory is that you can’t remember something that you haven’t paid attention to in the first place. What is attention? Attention is a filter. When attention is working, and you are surrounded by all the sights, sounds, and sensations that are part of your environment, what attention does is filter out everything but the one sight and/or sound that you want to focus on. Attention eliminates distractions. If you can focus without being distracted, you then have a better chance of remembering what it is that you want to recall later. Attention helps determine what will be remembered later.

Attention is how we choose what we want to remember. Your attentional ability determines how much information you can take in at any one time. You may very much want to flawlessly absorb every detail and remember all of it. Unfortunately, there is that annoying thing called distraction. The distraction can be anxiety, depression, fear, anger, feeling threatened, or something simple like mind wandering. A bad experience is hard to forget. ADHD is another well-known problem that is very common and involves issues with being distracted. The alertness needed to pay attention may also be compromised by being sleepy, being hungry, or simply the tediousness of a task. You have to be alert to pay attention.

Psychologists have done a great deal of research on the relationship between a person’s ability to pay attention and how that ability affects memory. It turns out that that relationship has a significant impact on cognition. What is cognition? A simple definition of cognition is that it is a person’s ability to think, learn new things, develop a fund of knowledge, use that stored information, solve problems, make decisions, plan, and interpret/understand what we see and hear.

A simple definition of memory is that it is the ability to intake or input information, store that information to refer to later, and the ability to later retrieve that information when needed. There are different types of memory, each with its own function. There is sensory memory, immediate memory, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory, to name some of the more widely known memory types.

It turns out that while attention impacts memory, your memory influences attention. Your memory can tell what you should be paying attention to. Things that have hurt or helped you in the past will attract your attention in the future. We don’t wake up in the morning with no memories at all. If that were the case, you would need to make the same mistakes, have the same successes and failures, and re-experience things you have already done, before you could make it through the day. Something like the movie Groundhog Day.

Think about how the interaction of attention and memory impacts your everyday life. Learning the alphabet, learning and using words, comprehending what you read, learning and using arithmetic, or just what you learn in general, requires being alert, with focused attention guided by the memory of what has been important in the past. Different people have different capacities for attention and memory. The differences in these capacities contribute to the varieties of people, their unique personalities, why people who have had the same experience remember it differently, and how they feel about it.

There are so many little things, of which we are unaware, that have such an important role in shaping who we are and how we evolve. The interaction between our ability to pay attention and our memory is one of those little things that has such a big impact.