Alpha Meals

Past research suggests that our ability to recall informationincreases when atypical items are presented within otherwise homogeneous sets. Weinvestigated whether this effect applied to performance on practical, everyday tasks. Ina computer-simulated restaurant scenario, participants acted as virtual servers,delivering “plates of food orders” to tables set up in different “rooms.” Platedestination was communicated using either a distinctive alphanumeric code or ahomogeneous numeric code, both of which indicated the room and table number for deliveryof food orders. We examined accuracy of plate delivery when two (low load) or three(high load) coded assignments were given per delivery trial. As expected, performancedeclined from the low- to high-load condition. Importantly, performance declined lesswith alphanumeric compared with all-numeric communication of assignments. Resultssuggest that increasing the distinctiveness of assignments, by using alphanumeric codes,can boost performance in real-life situations to significantly improve memory-relatedtask performance, particularly when cognitive load is taxed