Chewing Gum Improves Enduring Concentration

If you need to stay focused on tasks that require ongoing attention for extended periods of time, chewing gum will help you. Research had already shown that chewing gum can improve concentration in visual memory tasks and was now followed up by a study focused on the potential benefits of chewing gum during an audio memory task.

The interesting fact that chewing gum can benefit some areas of cognition has already been established by previous research -- and that is for a sugar free variant, otherwise the cause would be obvious and unsurprising. The current study focused on the particular cognitive area of an audio task that involved short-term memory recall to see to what degree chewing gum would improve concentration, especially in the later stages of the task.

The study, published in the British Journal of Psychology, involved 38 participants being split in to two groups. Both groups completed a 30-minute audio task that involved listening to a list of numbers from 1-9 being read out in a random manner.

Chris Miles and other researchers of Cardiff University then examined the participants on how accurately and quickly they were able to detect a sequence of odd-even-odd numbers, such as 7-2-1.

The results show that participants who chewed gum had quicker reaction times and more accurate results than the participants who didn’t chew gum. This was especially the case towards the latter parts of the task.

Participants who didn’t chew gum performed slightly better at the beginning of the task but were overtaken by the end. This suggests that chewing gum indeed helps us focus on tasks that require continuous monitoring over a longer amount of time.