WHAT IS ATTENTION?

By Glenda Thorne, Ph.D. and Alice Thomas, M.Ed.

Attention Quick facts

• Paying attention is the first step in the learning process.
• Everybody fails to pay attention sometimes, but some people fail to pay attention a lot.
• Not paying attention to what you are doing can be a problem for both children and adults. For example, not listening to the directions in class can cause a student to do an assignment wrong, and running a stop sign can cause an adult to have an accident or get a traffic ticket.
• It is easy for almost anyone to pay attention to things that are interesting or exciting to him.
• It is hard for most people to pay attention to things that are not very interesting or exciting to them.
• Emotions such as feeling anxious, sad or depressed make it harder for people to pay attention.
• It is difficult to pay attention to things when we are tired, sick or not feeling well.
• People differ in their ability to focus their attention at the right time on what is important.
• It is possible for people to manage their attention problems.

What is Attention?

According to John Ratey (2001), attention is more than just noticing incoming stimuli. It involves a number of processes including filtering out perceptions, balancing multiple perceptions and attaching emotional significance to these perceptions.

There are two major forms of attention: passive and active. Passive attention refers to the involuntary process directed by external events that stand out from their environment, such as a bright flash, a strong odor, or a sudden loud noise. We might say that because passive attention is involuntary, it is easy. Active attention is voluntary and is guided by alertness, concentration, interest and needs such as curiosity and hunger. Active attention also involves effort (Gaddes, 1994).

Active attention is a multidimensional cognitive process that includes the ability to select and focus on what is important at any given moment, the ability to consistently maintain mental effort while performing tasks that require mental energy and the ability to inhibit action or thought while previewing alternative actions or thoughts. In other words, it is a complex process that includes feeling alert and aroused, selecting what we should be attending to, ignoring what we don't want to attend to, and maintaining our focus for the right amount of time. Attention allows us to plan or preview and monitor and regulate our thoughts and actions.

Attention is the first step in the learning process. We cannot understand, learn or remember that which we do not first attend to. Levine (1987, 1990, 1998, 2002) has provided a conceptual framework for understanding the attention process and what happens to students when breakdowns in this process occurs. In addition, Russell Barkley (1997, 1998) has also contributed to our understanding of attention. Let's look now at each of the components of attention.

Alertness and Arousal

Alertness is the initial step in the attention process. If we are going to do something, or listen to someone, the first thing that we need is to feel alert and aroused. In other words, we need to feel like our battery is charged, like our brains have energy. Just the way our bodies need physical energy if we are going to run, our brains need mental energy if we are going to think.

It might help to understand mental energy and alertness if we think of a firecracker when it is going off. It sparkles and lights up; it bursts with energy! If it were a person, it would probably feel very alive and excited.

The part of the brain that controls our ability to become aroused and alert is the Reticular Activating System or RAS for short. The RAS is located in the brain stem at the back of the neck. It is the part of the brain that helps us feel alert and aroused when we wake up in the morning. It also allows us to feel tired at night so that we can get to sleep. We can think of the RAS as having a thermostat like the ones in our homes or schools that control room temperatures. In the morning, the "thermostat" activates us so that we wake up and become alert. At night, the thermostat on the RAS does just the opposite. It turns our mental activity level down, so we don't feel alert anymore. Instead, we feel tired and sleepy. If we still felt alert, we would not be able to get to sleep very easily. The RAS functions on its own. We don't have to tell it what to do, and we usually don't even think about it. It's a natural part of every day.

Selectivity and Saliency Determination

The next step in the attention process is called selectivity. At any moment, there are a multitude of stimuli that are potentially capable of capturing our attention. Because it is impossible to attend to them all, we must decide which ones are the most important. According to Levine (1990), attention is the brain's channel selector. When students are in a classroom, they may pay attention to what other students are doing, what is written on the board, the color of their friend's new shoes, someone walking down the hall, or what their teacher is saying. From these many possibilities, the brain must decide which are the most relevant from moment to moment and focus or concentrate on them. Further, even when concentrating on a certain task, there often are parts of that task that are more important than others and must be scrutinized closely. The ability to select the most important part of a task is called saliency determination. If a stimulus is salient, it stands out among other stimuli. For example, if we were in the mall and a group of fifty people all dressed in rather ordinary clothes with ordinary hairstyles passed us, we would probably not notice any particular one of them. However, if in this group of people there were one person who was wearing no clothes and had blue hair, we would certainly remember the individual! He would be very salient to us.

In the classroom, if the teacher is giving instructions on how to complete an assignment, these instructions are the most salient information at that moment and therefore what should be attended to. Also, if the teacher is giving a lecture in class and the students are taking notes, they can't write down every word the teacher is saying; there isn't enough time to do that. Therefore, they must decide what is most important or salient and write only this information down in their notebooks.

The part of the brain that controls our ability to select the most important or salient information is the frontal lobes. This part of the brain is just behind our forehead. Dr. Martha Denkla at Johns Hopkins University compares the RAS part of the brain to the frontal lobes. She says the RAS is like the lights in a house. The RAS lights up everything. The frontal lobes are like spotlights. They direct the light to specific places. So, the RAS gives us mental alertness or energy and the frontal lobes tell us where and for how long to direct that energy.

Distractibility

In order to select the most important or salient stimuli we need to attend to at any given moment, we must filter out or ignore other things around us that might distract us. Distractions may be visual, such as other people who are near us or the birds in the tree just outside the window. They may be auditory, such as the clock ticking on the wall. They may be our own bodies, such as feeling hungry. We may also be distracted by our own thoughts. This particular type of distraction may take the form of daydreaming or engaging in free flight of ideas in which one thought leads to another which leads to another and so on.

Levine (1998) refers to free flight as the spread of mental activation. In some circumstances, free flight is desirable and may be described as creativity or divergent thinking. In fact, according to Ned Hallowell (1994), creativity is attention deficits gone right. Other mental distractions may be thinking about the future or what is coming next instead of what is going on at the present time, such as what we are going to do over the weekend or the test we are going to have tomorrow.

Duration of Attention

Once we decide what we should attend to and filter out distractions, we must then attend to it for the right amount of time - not too long, not too short. This is called duration of attention. Levine also calls this focal maintenance. Focal maintenance means just what it sounds like it means - maintaining or staying focused.

In the first section on alertness and arousal, we talked about needing mental energy to think. In order to maintain focus, not only do we have to have mental energy, we also must maintain or sustain this mental energy for a sufficient amount of time. Just as we need physical energy to start a race, we also need enough energy to finish the race. In other words, our energy must be consistent; it must last for the right amount of time.

Some physical tasks take more energy than others. For example, it takes more energy to run a mile than it does to walk a mile. It's the same with tasks that require mental energy to complete. Some take more mental energy than others. Most students in school have tasks they like to do or that are easy for them to do, and tasks that they don't like to do or that are hard for them to do. The harder tasks - usually the tasks they don't like - always take more mental effort. For example, if a person really likes to play Nintendo or other electronic video games, it really doesn't take a lot of mental energy to pay attention while playing them. Also, if a person really likes math, it usually doesn't take a whole lot of mental energy or effort for him to do his math work. But if he doesn't like math and/or it is really hard for him, then the student must spend considerable mental energy or effort to do math. Also, once a student starts his math, he must have enough mental energy to finish it.

Just as physical energy needs to be steady or consistent to run a race, mental energy needs to be steady or consistent to complete a task that requires thinking. The part of the brain that controls our ability to maintain mental energy for a sufficient amount of time is the frontal lobes. This is the same part that controls our ability to select what information is most important or salient.

Previewing and Planning

The fifth component of attention is called previewing. Previewing can be thought of as reflection and planning. Before we act, we need to consider all of the possible actions we could perform and decide from among them which one is the best given the specific set of circumstances in which we find ourselves. To do this, we must consider the consequences of each possible action and eliminate those that do not lead to the desired outcome. Failing to take the time to engage in necessary planning or previewing is called impulsivity, or the inability to inhibit behavior or to regulate behavior by its consequences (Barkley, 1990). The behavior that needs to be regulated may be cognitive (thoughts), verbal, emotional or motor.

Previewing is important when one is interacting with other people, and it is important in the classroom. For example, many teachers do not want students to talk in class without first raising their hands. So when a student thinks of something she wants to say, she should stop and say to herself, "I must raise my hand first, or Ms. Smith will get mad at me." Also, if a person is having a conversation with a friend and the friend is saying something that reminds her of something she wants to say, she should wait until her friend has finished talking before she speaks. Another time when previewing skills are important is when a person is taking a test, especially a multiple-choice test. The test-taker should read all of the choices and think about whether each one is right before she marks one as correct on her paper.

Self-Monitoring and Self-Regulation

The sixth component of attention is called self-monitoring or self-regulation, and is a quality control issue. This component involves checking over a task that is in progress, assessing the progress, and making adjustments when necessary. Further, it involves reviewing a task after it has been completed and making sure that it is done correctly. In short, self-monitoring and self-regulation are "watching" ourselves doing something while we are doing it.

For example, when talking to a friend, a person needs to be very aware of what she is saying to her friend while she is saying it. Look at this situation. A person has just gotten a new dog and is very excited about her new pet. When talking to a friend whose dog just got hit by a car, however, she "watches" carefully to gauge her friend's response to her expressed excitement over her new dog. If she sees that the conversation is bringing back her friend's sad feelings over losing her pet, she expresses her sympathy and changes the subject.

Self-monitoring is important when one is doing schoolwork or taking tests. For example, when working math problems, a student should check over her work to make sure that she did not make a careless computational mistake. Another task that requires self-monitoring is when one is writing a paper. The writer will want to be sure to monitor herself so that she doesn't wander off the subject or make careless grammatical errors.

Self-regulation also includes regulating the speed of concentration or attention to a task. In order to complete a task, not only must sufficient time (i.e., duration) be allotted to the task, but also the pace must be sufficient so that each relevant aspect of the task can be attended to. Self-regulation involves judging the amount of time to allot to an overall task as well as to parts of the task. In addition, it involves the ability to predict how long a specific task will take to complete.

Tasks that are really hard and/or really important should be given more time to complete than tasks that are easier or less important. For example, more time should be set aside to read a lengthy chapter in social studies than to work five short problems in math. Also, when reading the social studies chapter, more time should be spent on concepts that are harder to understand than on those that are easier to understand. Another situation that calls self-regulation is when a student needs to study for a test. If a student has a math test the next day, he would want to put aside extra time to study math or work a few additional problems so he can be sure he is ready for the test.

Need for Stimulation and Body Movement

Other factors that are associated with attention include the need for stimulation and the need for body movement. There is a theory in psychology that proposes that all of us have what is referred to as an optimal level of arousal. That is, we each have some level of stimulation at which we are most comfortable. For some people, that optimal level of arousal is above average and they need considerable stimulation to feel "comfortable". These individuals are often called thrill seekers. They may enjoy activities such as going fast in cars, hang gliding and parachuting. They easily feel bored and they find boredom intolerable. Others people do not like high levels of stimulation and they feel sufficiently aroused when sitting at home reading a good book or talking on the phone to a friend. They find riding in fast-moving cars and hang gliding intolerable.

Likewise, there are people who seem to have an excess of energy and movement when compared with others. They are born with a greater need to move that is biological and authentic. This movement is often referred to as hyperactivity. People who are hyperactive are also often described as "always on the go" or "driven like a motor". Containing or channeling this excessive energy and movement can present a challenge in school, as being in school requires students to sit in desks and listen for much of the day, just as being in long business meetings or conferences requires the same for many adults. Dr. Martha Denkla at Johns Hopkins University says that the hardest thing kids have to do in school is to sit still all day. For some children and for some adults, sitting still is almost impossible, and so they may fidget or shake their leg or foot a lot. For some, this fidgetiness may be a compensatory strategy that helps them stay alert and awake.

While not all people with attention problems display visible hyperactivity, they may nevertheless experience hyperactivity of thoughts. That is, their thinking may be on high speed. They may say that their mind is always racing. Or, they may say they always feel restless. This restless is very uncomfortable for them.

In summary, attention is a very complicated process with many parts to it. Understanding the parts may help a student know what he needs to do in school to pay attention and learn more easily.

References

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