Pay Attention!

Why It's Not as Easy as You May

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Home Blog Pay Attention! Why It's Not as Easy as You May Think
Apr 19, 2016 by Martha Burns, Ph.D
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How often do you say to your child, Pay attention? Or, how often does a teacher
reprimand a student for not paying attention? We tend to think that attention is
something simple, either you are paying attention or you are not. But, it is actually
much more complex than most people realize. For example, doyou ever nd
yourself distracted enough when walking into a room to get something that you
forget what you came into the room for? Or, have you ever been listening to an
audio book only to realize that you stopped paying attention several pages back?
In fact, trying to gure out exactly what attention is, and why some children have
more trouble attending than others, especially in school, has been the focus of
psychologists for years. As adults, we realize that the ability to attend carefully to a
task, ignore distractions and stick with it, is something that takes time for children
to develop. But, what exactly is attention? Why is some information easier to attend

to than other kinds? What is an attentional disorder? And, perhaps most important, are there ways to improve
our attentional skills?

What is attention?
Perhaps the rst attempt to dene "attention" was made in The Principles of Psychology by William James. He
wrote, "Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession [in] the mind...of one....of several
simultaneous objects or trains of thought." (James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, page 403). But knowing
what we think attention involves doesn't help us understand how this ability develops in children or why is it so
difcult for all of us some of the time - and for some, a lot of the time. The elds of cognitive psychology and
cognitive neuroscience have begun to help us understand how very complicated something that seemed so
simple to William James, really is.

Attention redened
Neuroscientists like Dr. Michael Posner and his colleagues have helped us
understand that attention isn't just one thing. There are several types of
attention. To begin with, there are different components of attention that
correspond to different connected brain areas (networks). Dr. Posner and
colleagues have identied three of these: alerting, orienting and executive.
Alerting
You know that when you are alert you feel wide awake and responsive to
what is going on in the world around you. An alert state is very important for
performing any task well and we all know what it is like when we are groggy
and mentally foggy, perhaps when we rst wake up in the morning. There is a chemical, norepinephrine, that
modulates alertness largely in frontal and parietal brain regions. Alertness can be triggered by warning signals of
any kind which rapidly allow us to change from a resting state to being more receptive to a new stimulus; a good

example is the yellow light on a trafc signal that prepares us for when the light changes to red.
Orienting
The second component of attention is orienting. When you are oriented,you know where you are, who you are
with, the day and time and most important, what is needed to perform the relevant task at hand. We rely on
orientation to efciently navigate a large airport during a connection, for example. Our senses are very important
for orientation, allowing us to take in visual, auditory and tactile information from the world around us and use it
to gure out what is the most relevant information to accomplish a task. Navigating anairport during a tight
connection requires looking for appropriate signage and maps, asking ofcials if necessary, noting the boarding
time and guring out how quickly we need to move to get to the correct gate on time.
Executive
The third component of attention that Dr. Posner and colleagues have studied involves the executive network.
This is tied to our goals and helps us resolve competition for our attention when there are distractions or
conicts. We can think of this level of attention as akin to self-control, maintaining attention in a regulated and
purposeful way to accomplish a goal. The areas of the brain involved are complex and distributed widely
through the brain. The executive attention network enhances activity in brain regions related to our goals and
inhibits conicting activity. This control requires coordination of our executive functions (goals, priorities,
organization), emotions and other cognitive functions like memory and knowledge so that irrelevant feelings or
thoughts don't interfere with getting a job done. This kind of effortful control and self-regulation takes time to
mature, and can be quite variable from person to person (and task to task). Executive attention (sometimes
referred to as cognitive control) is highly correlated with success in school and later life.

Selective attention
One facet of executive attention known to be critical for academic success is selective attention. Dr. Courtney
Stevens and her colleagues have studied the relationship between selective attention and academics over the past
decade. Selective attention, depending on the activity, can involve one sense more than or in combination with

others. For example, listening to an audio book or a newscast on the radio requires auditory selective attention
while photography or drawing would require visual selective attention. When watching a newscast on TV we
can use the visual information to augment our auditory attention. Dancing and athletics often require selective
attention to movement and bodily senses, as well as visual and spatial attention to those moving nearby. For each
of our senses, children need to learn to selectively attend. Dr. Alison Gopnik and her colleagues have studied the
maturation of selective attention in young children as well as adults when they are in new environments. Shehas
found that young children, as well as adults in a new stimulating environment (like a rst trip to Paris during an
exciting time like a honeymoon), are often global attenders - taking in many sights and sounds at once. That
makes for a fun day at the park or vacation, but to get a job done or accomplish a goal, we need to be selective
about what we pay attention to (and ignore).

What is an attention decit disorder?

Selective auditory attention may be especially challenging, especially in today's world, where we are bombarded
with rapidly changing information and frequent technological interruptions. For many children, moving from the
world of multi-sensory experiences in play, sports and media (especially tablets and television) to sitting still and
selectively attending to a teacher in a classroom can be particularly difcult. For some children, there appears to
be a physiological limitation, beyond that expected for their age, on their ability to listen and learn on demand this is referred to as an attentional decit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) if the difculty involves both selective
attention and behavioral control, or ADD if there is not a problem sitting still. Although ADHD and ADD are
considered medical diagnoses and often treated with medication, there is evidence that attentional skills are
malleable.

The good news: attention is trainable!

In fact, many scientists including Drs. Posner, Stevens and their colleagues have found that attentional skills are
amenable to training. Dr. Stevens and colleagues found that a short (six week) period doing exercises in the Fast
ForWord Language program, that train selective auditory attention in several different contexts (language

listening tasks, two-tone rapid sequencing tasks, speech-sound discrimination tasks) resulted in improved
auditory selective attention for listening to stories read aloud, among both language impaired and typically
learning second graders compared to students who had a regular classroom curriculum but did not participate in
the specic auditory attention exercises.
In an article reviewing the research on the relationship between selective attention and academic achievement,
Dr. Stevens and her colleague Daphne Bavelier conclude, there may be large benets to incorporating attentiontraining activities into the school context (page S44). Luckily, neuroscience-based interventions are now
available to help educators build attentional skills in their students, to free them up so they can focus on covering
curriculum content.
How did you do? Did you scan the page, get distracted by your phone (alerting attention), or stop mid-stream to
think about your next vacation?Or did you maintain selective andexecutive attentionall the way through the
article? Let us know in the comments!
References:
Posner, M., Rothbart, M., Sheese, B and Voelker, P. (2014) Developing Attention: Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms. Advances in Neuroscience Article ID 405094.

Posner, M., Rueda, R. and Kanske, P. (2007) Probing the Mechanisms of Attention. In J.T. Caciopo, J.G. Tassinary & G.G. Berntson (eds), Handbook of Psychophysiology. Third Edition.
Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press (pp 410-432).

Stevens, C. and Bavelier, D. (2012) The role of selective attention on academic foundations: A cognitive neuroscience perspective. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 25:S30-S48.

Fast ForWord can help train selective auditory attention. Learn More.

Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus

Tags: attention, brain training


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Comments
Reading this article in the
Submitted by Brian Nashman (not veried) on Wed, 2016-04-20 00:46
Reading this article in the quiet of the evening greatly helped my sustained attention. Though I did pause to
question the grammar of one awkward sentence, " Watching a newscast on TV, however ..." Other pauses were
to reect on the ideas and information presented. Great article which I will share with parents.
reply

Thank you for your comment

Submitted by kcollins on Wed, 2016-04-20 16:34
Thank you for your comment Brian, and for your observation. That sentence has been corrected. Thanks!
reply