Children at school need this type of memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks, such as following teachers' instructions or remembering oral sentences. During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants' minds were wandering. At the end, participants measured their working memory ability by remembering a series of letters with simple maths questions. Daniel, a psychologist in the United States, said that those with higher working memory ability 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 previous research that found working memory allows humans to deal with multiple   thoughts at the same time. Dr Smallwood,in Leipzig,Germany,said: "What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren't very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources arrange _ to think about things other than what they're doing. " Working memory ability is also associated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ scores, and also offers a window into the widespread, but not well understood, field of internally   driven thoughts. 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. What can we learn from the passage?
It's not a bad thing for children with wandering minds. The result of the study doesn't agree with the previous research. Circumstances might make children's heads clever. Only working memory can handle difficult problems.