Attention facts for kids

Focused attention

Attention is like a spotlight for your brain. It's about focusing your awareness on one thing, while ignoring everything else around you. Think of it as choosing what information your brain pays most attention to, whether it's something you see, hear, or even a thought in your mind.

Imagine your brain can only handle a certain amount of information at once. Attention acts like a "bottleneck," letting only a small part of all the incoming information through. For example, when you look around, your eyes send a lot of data to your brain, but your attention picks out less than 1% of it. This is why you might not notice something obvious if you're really focused on something else – it's called inattentional blindness.

Scientists in fields like psychology and neuroscience study attention to understand how it works. They look at what makes us pay attention, how it affects our brain cells, and how it connects with other brain functions like working memory (your short-term mental workspace). They also study how brain injuries can affect attention and how attention can be different in various cultures.

The idea of attention is also important in understanding how our minds work and even in developing artificial intelligence.

What is Attention and How Do We Study It?

Before psychology became a science, thinkers called philosophers studied attention. One early philosopher, Juan Luis Vives, realized that the more closely you pay attention to something, the better you remember it.

In the 1990s, scientists started using special brain scans like positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These tools allowed them to see which parts of the brain were active when people were paying attention. This helped them discover a network of brain areas, especially in the front and top-back parts of the brain, that are important for controlling attention.

How We Focus: Selective and Visual Attention

When we talk about visual attention, there are a couple of ways to think about how it works. These are like mental pictures that help us understand how our eyes and brain focus.

• The Spotlight Model: Imagine your attention is like a spotlight. It shines brightly on one area, giving you a clear, detailed view of what's there. The area just outside the spotlight is a bit blurry, and everything else is ignored. This model helps explain how we focus on a specific part of what we see.

• The Zoom-Lens Model: This model is similar to the spotlight, but it adds the idea that your attention spotlight can change size, just like a camera lens. If your attention "zooms in" on a small area, you get a very detailed view. If it "zooms out" to cover a larger area, you get less detail from each part because your brain's attention resources are spread thinner.

Scientists also have theories about how our brain combines different features (like color, shape, and size) to recognize objects. One idea is that we first unconsciously notice these separate features, and then our focused attention puts them all together to see a complete object.

Attention and Your Brain's Systems

Two important thinkers, Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, developed a model that says your working brain has three main parts that are always active:

• The Attention system
• The Memory system
• The Activation system (which gets your brain ready to work)

Their ideas have greatly shaped how we understand attention today.

Can You Multitask? Divided Attention

Multitasking means trying to do two or more things at the same time. However, research shows that when people multitask, they often make more mistakes or do tasks more slowly. This is because your attention has to be divided among all the tasks.

For example, studies have looked at people driving while texting or talking on the phone. They found that driving performance gets worse. Drivers make more mistakes, brake later, and are less aware of their surroundings. It's not just about having your hands free; it's the mental effort of dividing your attention that causes problems.

One idea is that your brain has a limited pool of attention resources. If you try to do two tasks that use the same type of attention (like listening to the radio and writing a paper), it's much harder because they interfere with each other. As you get better at a task, it requires less attention, freeing up some resources for other things.

Simultaneous Attention: Learning from Others

Simultaneous attention is when you pay attention to several things happening at the same time, continuously. This is different from multitasking, where you switch your focus back and forth.

Some studies show that children in certain Indigenous communities, especially in the Americas, often learn through a process called "observing and pitching in." This way of learning encourages them to pay very close, wide attention to their surroundings and to what adults are doing. For example, Maya children in San Pedro are often observed paying attention to many events at once, coordinating their activities with others in a group. This shows a strong cultural difference in how attention is managed.

Different Ways We Pay Attention

Overt and Covert Orienting

Attention can be divided into two main types:

• Overt orienting: This is when you physically move your eyes to look at something you want to pay attention to. You can see these eye movements.
• Covert orienting: This is when you shift your mental focus without moving your eyes. Imagine you're looking straight ahead, but you're secretly paying attention to something in your side vision. This allows you to quickly scan your surroundings for interesting things.

Exogenous and Endogenous Orienting

How your attention is directed can also be controlled in two ways:

• Exogenous orienting: This is when something outside of you suddenly grabs your attention. For example, a loud noise or a sudden flash of light will automatically make you look. It's like a reflex.
• Endogenous orienting: This is when you intentionally choose to pay attention to something based on your goals or what you want to do. For example, if you're looking for your friend in a crowd, you're using endogenous attention.

Scientists also talk about "bottom-up" and "top-down" attention.

• Bottom-up processing (like exogenous attention) is when something in the environment itself (like a bright color or movement) pulls your attention. You don't choose to pay attention; it just happens.
• Top-down processing (like endogenous attention) is when your own goals or thoughts guide your attention. You choose what to focus on.

How Much Information Can We Handle?

The "perceptual load theory" suggests that your ability to pay attention depends on how much information is coming in.

• If there's a lot of information (high load), especially things related to your task, it's easier to ignore distractions.
• If there's not much information (low load), your mind might pick up on irrelevant things too.

Some people, like highly trained Morse code operators, can process a lot of information at once because their skills become automatic, freeing up their attention for other tasks.

Attention in Healthcare: A Clinical Model

In healthcare, especially for patients with brain injuries, attention is seen as a basic function needed for all other thinking skills. A common model describes attention in growing levels of difficulty:

• Focused attention: Being able to respond to a specific sound or sight.
• Sustained attention: Staying focused on a task for a long time, like reading a book.
• Selective attention: Staying focused on one thing even when there are distractions around you.
• Alternating attention: Being able to switch your focus between different tasks.
• Divided attention: Being able to do multiple tasks at the same time.

This model helps doctors understand and help patients improve their attention skills.

Other Ways to Describe Attention

• Mindfulness: This is a practice that trains your attention to focus on the present moment, noticing thoughts and feelings without judgment.
• Vigilant attention: This is the ability to stay focused on a task that might not be very exciting or stimulating for a long time.

Attention and the Brain: Neural Correlates

When you pay attention to something, the brain cells (neurons) involved in processing that information become more active. It's like they "fire" more strongly.

Scientists have a model that puts working memory at the center of attention.

• Working memory temporarily holds information for you to think about.
• Your brain then chooses which information gets into working memory.
• Your higher-level thinking can help guide this selection (top-down control).
• Automatic filters in your brain also make you notice new or important things (bottom-up control).

Different parts of the brain, like the frontal lobe and parietal lobe, work together to control attention and eye movements.

Another model divides attention into three parts:

• Alerting: Becoming and staying awake and ready to pay attention.
• Orienting: Directing your attention to a specific thing.
• Executive attention: This is like your brain's boss, helping you manage attention when there are conflicts or many things to focus on.

Attention Across Cultures

Children develop attention patterns based on their family and community cultures. As mentioned before, some Indigenous communities show that children learn to pay attention to many things at once, which helps them learn by observing and participating in daily activities. This is different from cultures where learning might be more focused on one-on-one instruction.

Computer Models of Attention

Scientists are also trying to teach computers to "pay attention" like humans do. They create models that help computers focus on important parts of images or videos, similar to how our eyes and brain work.

Hemispatial Neglect: When Attention Goes Wrong

Sometimes, if a person has brain damage, especially to the right side of their brain, they might experience something called hemispatial neglect. This means they tend to ignore the left side of their body or even the left side of objects they see. It's like their attention "forgets" that side exists.

Attention in Social Situations

Social attention is how we focus our limited attention resources in social situations. This includes paying attention to other people's faces or where they are looking. It also involves balancing attention between yourself and others. Sometimes we focus on ourselves (like our own name), and other times we focus on others to understand what they are thinking or feeling. Problems with this balance can be seen in some conditions like autism spectrum disorders.

What Distracts Us?

Distractions can come in two main forms:

• Sensory distractions: These are things you see, hear, or feel that pull your attention away. For example, ignoring the white space around this text while reading.
• Emotional distractions: Strong emotions, whether positive or negative, can make it harder to focus. If someone shouts your name, your attention immediately shifts. Positive emotions might make you more open to distractions because you feel safe and less need to filter.

Not getting enough sleep can also make it harder to divide your attention and focus.

When We Fail to Notice Things

• Inattentional blindness: This happens when you're so focused on one thing that you completely miss other things that are clearly there. For example, in an experiment, people focused on a cross might not see a square that appears on the screen.
• Change blindness: This is when you have trouble noticing changes between scenes, even if the changes are big. This is often seen in movies with "continuity errors" where something in a scene changes between shots, but most viewers don't notice.

How We Started Studying Attention

Early Ideas: The Philosophical Period

Early philosophers thought a lot about attention. Nicolas Malebranche believed attention was needed to keep our thoughts organized. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz introduced the idea of "apperception," which is how new experiences connect with what you already know. He also talked about attention being either automatic (like a reflex) or voluntary (when you choose to focus).

Early thinkers also debated how much we can pay attention to at once. Some thought we could only focus on one thing, but Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet suggested we could pay attention to a few things at a time, like holding a handful of marbles.

From 1860 to 1909: The Start of Experiments

This period brought attention studies into the scientific lab. Wilhelm Wundt, who started the first psychology lab, measured how fast people could process information. He realized that the time it took to switch attention from one thing to another was important.

Franciscus Donders used "mental chronometry" (measuring mental processing speed) to study attention. He measured how long it took to identify something and choose a response.

Hermann von Helmholtz showed that you could focus on one part of something (like a letter in a word) while still being aware of the other parts.

William James, a famous psychologist, wrote in 1890 that "Everyone knows what attention is." He described it as focusing your mind on one thing out of many possibilities, and how it means ignoring other things to deal with what you're focusing on. He also talked about different types of attention, like focusing on things you can see versus things you can only imagine.

From 1910 to 1949: A Quiet Time for Attention Research

During this time, less research was done on attention as other areas of psychology became more popular. However, some important discoveries were still made.

• In 1927, Jersild studied "mental set and shift," showing that it takes longer to switch between different types of tasks.
• In 1931, Telford discovered the "psychological refractory period," meaning there's a short delay after your brain processes one thing before it can fully process another.
• In 1935, John Ridley Stroop created the famous Stroop Effect task. In this task, you see words like "BLUE" printed in a different color ink, like red. You have to say the color of the ink, not the word. It's much harder and slower because your brain automatically reads the word, which conflicts with naming the color.

From 1950 to 1974: The Cognitive Revolution and Renewed Interest

In the 1950s, psychologists became very interested in attention again. They started studying how our brains process information, even if we can't directly see those processes.

A key moment was Colin Cherry's study of the "cocktail party effect" in 1953. He wondered how people at a noisy party could focus on one conversation and ignore all the others. He did experiments where people listened to different messages in each ear through headphones and had to focus on just one.

This led to theories like Donald Broadbent's "Filter Model," which suggested that our brain filters out unwanted information very early on. Later, other scientists like Anne Treisman and Deutsch & Norman proposed different ideas, leading to a big debate about whether we filter information early or process it all first and then select what to pay attention to.

See Also

In Spanish: Atención para niños

Images for kids

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  The spotlight model of attention shows how attention focuses on one area.