Promoting Student Attention: How to Understand, Assess, and Create Conditions for Attention

Chapter 1. Understanding Attention

Standing in front of the class, you turn toward the whiteboard to write down the main points of a lesson. Out of the corner of your eye, you see one student pick up their mobile phone and start texting. Another is whispering to a friend. When you turn back to the class, you see other students are looking around the room—and not at you.

You ask everyone to start a task, but then one student immediately asks you to repeat the directions. Another passes a note to a friend. Yet another has materials on their desk, but not the ones needed for the assignment.

A group of five students at a table watches you demonstrate a concept they will work on together or by themselves. The other students in the class are supposed to be working quietly as you demonstrate, but they're chatting about school or people they know.

Sound familiar?

These are some examples of student inattention in the classroom. As a teacher, you intuitively know that if students aren't paying attention, they aren't learning. And if they aren't learning, you may feel as though you're failing as a teacher. You've tried different strategies: redirecting, modeling on-task behaviors, using nonverbal cues, and offering incentives like extra points, but they don't seem to work. All students, to one degree or another, apparently have problems sitting still, following instructions, or staying on task.

Over the last quarter century, attention to attention has taken a turn. Not only are more students "not paying attention," a common teacher complaint, but inattention now is "so much worse." But this claim is unfounded. It's true that students today face more available distractions from social media, computers in their pockets and on their wrists, and ubiquitous connections to humans of all ages in all parts of the world. Yet attention has broader implications. We attend to what has meaning for us; our attention depends on conditions in our environment that enable or interfere with our ability to maintain focus. Distractions can disrupt attention, as can our intrusive thoughts related to the anxieties of day-to-day life.

Although I acknowledge the frustration behind many of the complaints about "kids these days," this book will not explain how to "fix" them. Indeed, I take the opposite approach. I focus on how to improve the adults in the classroom—ourselves.

We educators enable the next generation to think critically, solve life's problems, and participate responsibly in their communities. To do this successfully, we need to see ourselves as continually learning students, too. We're just more advanced and experienced students. We learn from all the people who surround us in our daily lives, including, and especially, the students in our classrooms. This book encourages teachers to pay attention to how they deal with inattention, to examine what inattention might mean for individual students, and to reflect on how changing their own approach to attention issues in the classroom can strengthen learning for all.

The Basics of Attention

What does it mean to "pay attention"?

When you're talking to a friend on the phone, you're paying attention. When students are engrossed in writing in a class, they are paying attention. When I am grading papers, I am paying attention. When students are playing a video game, they are paying attention. People pay attention when they talk, work, write, and play.

Attention is a cognitive process that enables us to attend actively to specific information in our environment while tuning out other details and stimuli. Attention includes the ability to switch our focus from one target to another and to maintain focus on a specific target for a sustained period of time.

We look at attention as an effect rather than a cause. This shift is important. Instead of seeing students' inattention as a problem they have, which can lead to ineffective criticism and judgment, we can become curious about why students may be inattentive and what we might do to address that. Truly understanding attention—its roots in cognition, the types of attention, and ways to think more constructively about it—enables teachers to take proactive steps to create better conditions for student learning.

To start, let's take a step back and look through a cognitive psychology lens to get a deeper understanding of how we learn and where attention fits in the learning process.

Attention and Cognitive Psychology

You are likely familiar with behavioral and cognitive psychology concepts from your educational psychology courses in college. Behaviorism was the dominant school of thought in psychology from the 1920s to the 1970s. It's hard to imagine now, but until the 1970s, psychologists believed that a student's mind was a "black box" too complex and inaccessible to understand or explain. For example, if we told a math student to write answers to problems on a piece of paper, what occurred in the student's mind (the black box) to figure out the problem was unobservable, so the focus was on what we could see—the student writing on the paper and producing a result. Behaviorists focused on reinforcement and punishment. If teachers wanted a student to complete a task, they offered positive reinforcement, such as giving students candy when the task was complete. To stop unacceptable student behavior, like leaving their seat, teachers would use negative reinforcements, such as taking away recess, or punishment, such as sending the student to the principal's office.

By the late 1960s, cognitive psychologists started changing how we think about thinking. They believed that what was going on in the black box was entirely relevant to learning and, therefore, worth figuring out. In 1968, University of California psychology professor Richard Atkinson and his student Richard Shiffrin developed a new model of cognition that outlined discrete steps in the thinking process. Influenced by the new field of cybernetics—a theory that each step, or action, in a system is an input for the next action—Atkinson and Shiffrin's model arranged the steps of cognition in a sequence of inputs and outputs.

With our math student in mind, consider Figure 1.1, which shows a series of inputs and outputs. The stimulus of telling the student to write answers to math problems is an input in the model. The student then goes through a series of thinking processes, or actions, to respond, from hearing the task directions, to working in small steps on the problem, to understanding and remembering the steps.

Figure 1.1. An Example of Inputs and Outputs Within the Information Processing Model

Initial Input: Teacher tells student to write answers.

Sensory Memory Output: Student hears task directions. Hearing the directions becomes the input.

Working Memory Output: Student works the steps of the math problem. Thinking through the steps becomes the input.

Long-Term Memory Output: Student understands and remembers the math steps.

Figure 1.1 also labels the steps in the model. The student's thinking begins with information that enters through the senses, called sensory memory (the student hears and sees). Then the student maintains that information in their short-term memory, later dubbed working memory, which both stores a small amount of information for a short time and manipulates that information (the student works the math problem steps) (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). Finally, the student processes that information so that it moves to long-term memory (the student understands and remembers the steps).

Try all three steps in the information processing model—those involved in sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory—and see where attention fits. Imagine you are at a grocery store. When you walk down the cereal aisle, your eyes sense many items on the shelves, which you recognize as cereal boxes. You select a box, look at the ingredients, and note the grams of sugar and sodium. Then you turn to a different cereal and compare the contents to make a final selection. You notice that this box has an image of a bowl on the front, and you suddenly recall a visit you made to your grandmother, who had that cereal at her house.

What steps in the information processing model did you use? You sensed items, attended to one cereal box, kept information from the ingredients listed on that box in your working memory, and then went to the next box to compare ingredients. Then you made a decision, and some of the information from your decision-making process moved to long-term memory, whereas other information was forgotten.

The working memory manipulation could not have happened without attention. Attention kicks in right after receiving the information through our senses and before it shifts to our working memory. As we keep our attention on the cereal box, our working memory has time to manipulate the information. Some of that information will then transfer to long-term memory (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2. An Example of Attention Within the Information Processing Model

Sensory Memory:

Sees many cereal boxes
Selects to attend to cereal box by orienting attention and ignoring other stimuli

Working Memory: Thinks about cereal box, continues to attend

Long-Term Memory: Decides about the cereal, forgets some information, remembers other information (which goes to long-term memory)

By understanding how attention fits into the steps of the information processing model, we can see that attention is essential in cognition—and that without attention, cognition stalls.

This information processing model sparked what is considered the cognitive revolution, the formal recognition of the study of cognitive psychology and the importance of thinking processes (Malmberg et al., 2019). This model has dominated research in the field of psychology for the last 50 years and is a basis for advances in the evolving neurobiology of attention (see "Learn More" at the end of this chapter). For our purposes, it is helpful to think of attention as the step between sensation and working memory.

Three Types of Attention

William James, who wrote the first known psychology textbook in 1890, illustrated the concept of attention this way:

Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. … It implies withdrawal from some things in order to effectively deal with others. (pp. 403–404)

James says we intuitively know what attention is, yet he also points out its complexity. Even now, cognitive scientists continue to debate the concept of attention, and much still evades their understanding.

There are multiple types of attention (Pashler, 1997; Petersen & Posner, 2012; Posner & Petersen, 1990; Posner et al., 1988; Sohlberg & Mateer, 1989). To explore these types, consider your attention right now. As you are reading these words, many sensations around you might be claiming your attention. You may hear the hum of the traffic outside, feel the socks on your feet, or smell the dog bone you gave to your pup so that you could have some undisturbed time to read. As I point these sensations out, you organize the sensations and begin to actively pay attention to them.

This example illustrates the three attention types. You might choose to attend to your socks, while deciding to ignore conflicting sensory inputs, like the sound of the air conditioner. Then you might choose to disengage your attention from your socks and shift attention to look at the bone your dog is chewing. Then you might notice that your dog looks pretty cute holding the bone in her teeth, so you might sustain your attention for a time on her.

So attention is not as simple as "I am paying attention" or "the student is paying attention." These statements imply that we think of attention like a camera focusing on a singular object. Attention is much more complex. Rather, think of attention as consisting of the multiple ways that a camera focuses on objects: selecting an image and ignoring other images around it, moving the lens to a new scene, sharpening or blurring the background, and using a flash to take a picture.

Like this active and varied use of a camera, we use three main types of attention to focus on information:

Selective attention
Alternating attention
Sustained attention

Let's look at these in more detail.

Selective Attention

Selective attention, the most familiar and studied type, is the ability to focus on the task at hand while rejecting other sensory input (Broadbent, 1958; Treisman, 1964). The classroom contains many sensory inputs making claims on student attention. Consider what you filter out while helping one student in your classroom with a writing task: papers rustling, students talking, chairs squeaking, the heater clunking, feet tapping, clocks ticking, mobile devices beeping. Your students, whose brains are not fully developed, also need to ignore these sensory inputs while selecting to focus on their individual writing tasks.

To understand selective attention, it is helpful to review the research process that cognitive psychologists use in the laboratory with both adults and children. A popular experiment is the dichotic listening task, where the subject wears headphones and is given the task of attending to sounds in one ear while filtering out sounds in the other ear (Moray, 1959). For example, researchers might instruct a subject to listen to a story in the left ear and ignore the story in the right ear. When the stories end, the subject is asked to repeat what they heard in each ear. Although they can recall sounds in the right ear, the subject can't repeat the story; the only story they recall is the one they heard in the left ear. This shows that someone can selectively attend to, or focus on, chosen stimuli in the presence of other distracting stimuli.

Researchers discuss selective attention as top-down (i.e., goal-directed) or bottom-up (i.e., stimulus-directed). The subjects in this experiment had a goal-directed selective attention task: to attend to the story in their left ear and ignore the story in their right ear. If, however, they heard a louder sound in their right ear and turned their attention toward it, this would be a stimulus-directed selective attention task. In the classroom, we want to see selective attention that is goal-directed and voluntary, where the student has control over selecting the target and rejecting the stimulus (Gazzaley & D'Esposito, 2007).

Selective attention is important from an early age. Toddlers would not learn to talk if they could not ignore a barking dog and traffic outside a window; they may hear sounds around them, but they ignore them to attend to the caregiver commanding their attention with a favorite toy. As the child develops, selective attention evolves from more stimulus-directed to more goal-directed and voluntary. This enables the child to deal effectively with all the sensory information in the environment, as well as with thoughts that could be troublesome, such as fear related to anxiety or recurring negative images related to depression (Posner et al., 2019).

By 7 years of age, a child has developed goal-directed selective attention skills (Rueda, Fan et al., 2004). In school activities, selective attention is essential in all tasks, from initiating assignments to focusing on a response, as opposed to just responding impulsively. Strategies for promoting selective attention can range from decreasing the amount of stimuli (Lavie et al., 2004) to helping the child set and carry out goals (Bradley et al., 2003; Pereira et al., 2021). Moreover, when students have background knowledge of the target of attention, they are more likely to choose to attend to it (Awh et al., 2012).

Selective attention also is enhanced by what researchers call "reward history." For example, students may first choose to read a story with pictures of families like their own. As a result, they may experience satisfaction (the reward) from the story—confidence in their reading, positive feelings about the story—and so they may continue to choose to attend to reading.

Try This: A Dichotic Listening Task

Experiment with being a research subject by putting headphones on and listening to this video by OK Science on YouTube, "What Is Dichotic Listening and Selective Attention?" Focus on what you are hearing in one ear, and ignore the sounds in the other ear. What do you recall in your left ear? In your right ear? What was this experience like for you?

Alternating Attention

Alternating attention, also called orienting, involves three mental operations: disengaging one of our senses, like sight, from one activity or stimulus; moving to another stimulus; and then engaging with a new sense or object (Posner & Petersen, 1990; Sohlberg & Mateer, 1989). Let's say you are sitting at your desk, looking at your mobile phone. Your principal walks into the room to stand in front of your desk. First, you disengage your current focus on the phone. Second, you move your eyes to the new selected target, the principal. Last, you reengage your focus on the selected target, the principal.

Now, consider students alternating their attention when you ask them to move from one task to another. For example, a common task shift in elementary school is lining up in the classroom to leave. A student shifts from looking at a friend to look at the line, then looks back to the materials on the desk; puts away the materials; and, finally, gets up to join the line.

As with selective attention, cognitive psychologists have also researched alternating attention. The cueing task (Posner, 1980) examines how an individual performs an attention shift. Study participants are told to focus on an X at eye level on a computer screen. There is a box to the left of the X and a box to the right of the X. The researcher asks the participant to select the box where a dot appears. The researcher presents a cue before the dot appears, such as a horizontal line in the box. The cue consistently leads the subject's attention to move from one location to the target location.

The result shows not only the three steps in a shift (disengage, shift, and reengage), but also that this shift happens mentally before we move our eyes to the new target. The cueing task demonstrates this mind shift because the time delay between the cue and the dot is measured at just 100 milliseconds. This is insufficient time for the eyes to move to the dot, suggesting that the mind shifts before the eyes. The cue, therefore, not only leads to a shift in visual attention but also triggers the mind to attend to this shift beforehand.

This mental shift is called covert orienting, where we switch toward a new stimulus mentally, before our eyes or other senses move toward the new target. With overt orienting, our senses move right away.

In our daily lives, altering attention in the mind first is necessary. What would happen if we were in a grocery store aisle, looking at cereals to buy, and the fire alarm went off? We need to be able to disengage visually from looking at the cereal and reengage visually with the aisle so that we can get out of the store. The quicker we shift our mind first, the quicker we escape from danger.

Like selective attention, alternating attention can be directed by a stimulus, such as a fire alarm, but it is also voluntary, such as when choosing to reorient attention back to a task. Voluntary orienting can help children not only engage in a task but also disengage from intrusive thoughts or something fearful from a prior trauma. For example, if we've been in a fire previously and then see one in the grocery store, we may have difficulty quickly disengaging to look for the escape route (Posner et al., 2019).

Babies can reorient their attention in their first few months, and the voluntary shift of attention develops throughout childhood (Rothbart & Posner, 2015). In everyday activities, attention shifting is central to cognitive tasks. Students continually need to switch verbal and auditory attention from listening to a teacher or a peer, to reading or writing, to watching a demonstration. Cuing, as in the laboratory experiment, helps with orienting. If a teacher shows a certain image related to a topic, it can help learners switch attention to that topic. Also, when students have a positive relationship with a goal or the target stimulus, such as with a given task or a certain teacher, shifting attention toward that stimulus and away from other activities is easier.

When we selectively attend or reorient our attention, our attention focuses on a new stimulus: the book to read, the person giving instructions, the place to go to line up. The goal becomes keeping that focus, and that is where sustained attention—the third attention type we'll discuss—becomes important.

Try This: A Cueing Task

You may want to experiment by trying Posner's Cueing Task from psychological testing software provider Millisecond. Be sure to have about 15 minutes to complete the task. Go to www.millisecond.com/download/library/v6/cueingtask/cueingtask/cueingtask.web, follow the quick steps to download the demo, and click "start." What was this experience like for you—first of all, with the flashing boxes before the star appeared, and second, with the flashing arrows before the star appeared? Did you notice the mind shift before the visual shift?

Sustained Attention

Sustained attention is the ability to obtain and maintain an alert state, or focus, for an extended period of time (Fortenbaugh et al., 2017; Posner & Rothbart, 2018); we can consider it a combination of vigilance and concentration (Sohlberg & Mateer, 1989). In the classroom, you probably sustain your attention to students as you watch their behaviors to see if they understand a task or need help. Likewise, your students sustain their attention when they ask you questions and get feedback on their task. Selective attention is about ignoring interferences, whether those interferences are intrusive thoughts or peers talking in the corner, whereas sustained attention is the focus that occurs after that selection: you work on a task, you try different approaches, you go back to the beginning to check steps.

Researchers have studied sustained attention using experiments, such as tests of continuous performance, which examine how an individual focuses on a rarely occurring target on a computer screen while other, continually changing stimuli occur (Kim et al., 2015). For example, participants are asked to watch for the numbers 1 or 2 on a screen. If they see number 1, then they should click the mouse. But if they see number 2, they should not click the mouse. The challenge while watching is that attention may drift; in that case, the participant may not always click the mouse when number 1 appears or may inadvertently click it when number 2 appears. The more correct clicks, the more the individual displays sustained attention.

Tests of continuous performance mirror real-life situations where errors can occur during sustained focus. Air traffic controllers must continually watch for specific stimuli on radar. Truck drivers, airport security screeners, and soccer goalkeepers must also maintain sustained focus. Like inadvertently clicking on the mouse when the number 2 is present, a goalkeeper can err by moving to block the soccer ball when it appears to be flying into the goal but is really on a different trajectory.

Sustained attention develops throughout childhood, and some research shows rapid growth of this kind of attention between 5 and 6 years old and again between 11 and 12 years old (Betts et al., 2006). Although sustained attention is important in reducing errors in jobs and sports, it also has a great effect on learning. For example, when students sustain their focus on a math problem, text, or verbal presentation, they can hold that information in working memory so that learning—processing information into long-term memory—can occur.

Several factors influence students' sustained attention (Oken et al., 2006). When students are interested or the task has meaning for them, they are more likely to concentrate on it. But when they experience stress, focused attention may become difficult, and they may become hypervigilant to external sensations perceived as negative or as a threat. For example, a student with a negative relationship with the teacher may be hypervigilant about the teacher's location in the room, or a student encountering too much task information can lose focus due to the stress of not understanding. And, finally, when students maintain attention on a task over a long period of time, such as doing a repetitive computer task or too many math problems of the same difficulty level, their brains can start to see the constant stimulation as unimportant, causing a drop in focus (Ariga & Lleras, 2011). For this reason, laboratory studies of sustained attention offer participants breaks, as do real-life jobs requiring extended vigilance. After the events of 9/11, for example, airport security screeners started to get breaks every hour. This helped decrease errors in detecting potentially hazardous items on security X-ray screens. In the classroom, taking a break from focusing is a way to chunk the work; it gives students time to focus on one part of a task before starting another.

Try This: A Sustained Attention Response Task

Continuing in your role of research subject, try the Sustained Attention Response Task (SART) created by Robertson and colleagues (1997). Located at psytoolkit.org, this experiment calls on participants to hit the space bar in response to different numbers displayed on the computer screen, and then the demo catalogs your responses. What were your results? What was this experience like for you?

Putting Types of Attention into Context

In the real world, these three types of attention do not work independently. Rarely do we decide to attend to a target—and then nothing else happens. We might see a book on our nightstand and then pick it up and start reading it, using sustained attention. Or we might see the book on the nightstand, but then our spouse comes in the room and starts talking, and we alternate our attention to them. And sometimes we see a book, start reading it, and then stop to write down something from the book we want to remember. We are continually moving back and forth among the types of attention, with little or no awareness of the variation.

Similarly, students in the classroom are constantly solving mental conflicts, orienting their attention to new events, and focusing on new things throughout the day (Petersen & Posner, 2012). Modern attention research agrees: attention types are networked across brain structures using different brain chemicals, and some types also are combined and interact (Posner, 2023). Researchers continue to make new discoveries about how attention networks operate, even branching off into how attention connects with other cognitive processes documented over the years.

Knowing the basics of attention is essential to helping teachers understand that attention is a process and that conditions can be created to improve student attention. All three types of attention occur in the classroom all the time, and some strategies work best on discrete types of attention, while other strategies work on all three together. For example, chunking information helps with sustained attention, and when a student is presented with one small step of a task, they can then choose to attend to it or alternate their attention to it from a different activity.

We next explore how conditions in the classroom can influence this cognitive process. In other words, what happens when we think of attention as an effect rather than a cause?

Attention as Effect

Attention can be both a cause and an effect, depending on your vantage point. Consider a children's story in which the main character, a child, runs away, making their parents sad. Later we find out why the child ran away—to retrieve a teddy bear that a neighbor took the day before. The act of running away had a cause, just as the resulting act caused the parents' sadness.

We often think of attention as a cause in school. We may believe that focused attention or lack of attention causes students to persist or drop out of school or display high or low academic achievement (Arnold et al., 2020; Cortés Pascual et al., 2019). However, considering attention as an effect enables us to focus on understanding its causes and creating conditions for student-centered learning.

Think back to the information processing model in which sensory inputs preceded attention. We now know that attention not only is activated by our environment through our senses, but also is internal and voluntary, based on our experiences. Background knowledge, internal states, and ongoing needs are all causes of attention (Krauzlis et al., 2014). Figure 1.3 illustrates that these three areas, along with sensory input, are all attention activators.

Figure 1.3. Attention Activators

Attention

Sensation
Prior knowledge
Internal status
Ongoing need

Let's think about how reframing attention as an effect of multiple causes can shift our understanding. Which statement—A or B—suggests you have control over your attention?

I was paying attention; therefore, I completed grading student papers.
I placed my distracting mobile phone out of reach; therefore, I was able to focus on grading student papers.

Sentence A describes your attention as something you just have or do, without recognizing what facilitated that attention in the first place. In sentence B, attention is the effect of your putting your phone out of reach. If you selected B, you saw your attention as an action you needed to take to complete your task. It assumes that attention is attainable—and that it can happen when we create the right conditions.

Reframing Attention as an Effect in School

If you've ever thought of a student as being lazy or indifferent about academics, you're not alone. If a student is consistently off task, it can be natural to attribute that behavior to the person's character (i.e., "This student just doesn't care about school"). This is known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977), where we overemphasize a person's character in evaluating a "bad" behavior and we underemphasize the situation. But if we were off task ourselves, we would attribute our behavior to the environment, like the content not being interesting—not our own character flaw.

As you can imagine, cognitive biases like the fundamental attribution error do not support student learning. If a teacher thinks students do not care about academics, the students may start to develop negative relationships with the teacher and engage in off-task behaviors or feel excluded, when all they needed was a little help with their learning.

Another common bias is affinity bias, our tendency to be drawn to people like us. Research on prospective teachers showed that if teachers were intrinsically motivated to perform, they tended to believe that students with on-task academic behaviors were similarly motivated and that students with off-task behaviors were lazy. The opposite was also true. Teachers who had avoided tasks in school didn't see off-task students as lazy, but, instead, viewed the students as lacking confidence or needing support in their work (Beghetto, 2007).

We are also not immune to racial bias. In a study of nationally representative samples of teachers over three decades, Bobo and colleagues (2012) found that compared to Black and Hispanic teachers, white teachers were more likely to rate Black and Hispanic students as "lazy" and to rate white and Asian students as "hardworking." (See Quinn & Stewart [2019] for a representative sample of teachers from 1975 to 2016.) It's important to note that compared with adults outside school, teachers have more positive perceptions of Black and Hispanic students (Quinn, 2017). This may be attributed, in part, to teachers' education levels because those with higher educational attainment generally have fewer implicit racial biases than those with lower attainment (Wodtke, 2012).

Our intentions, of course, are the opposite of these scenarios. We are committed to our students, so much so that such biases, despite being quite common, are difficult to admit, even to ourselves. Recognizing that we encounter stereotypical messages in the media and in our communities—and that these messages affect our social interactions—can help us turn around these biases in ourselves and others (Greenwald et al., 2002). If we don't recognize our own biases, we may continue to see attention as an effect of character. When students aren't paying attention, we may assume that something is wrong with them, that they're simply inattentive. This may prevent us from looking for the real cause.

Conclusion

This book doesn't just focus on simple reflections, like wondering about choosing cereal boxes or grading student papers. Instead, it invites us to engage in critical reflection, to become aware of and then question our own experiences and behaviors (Brookfield, 1995, 2017; Dewey, 1933). By doing so, we can more easily reframe our thoughts and attitudes and try new approaches.

Critical reflection can encourage more positive attitudes about students, which are linked to higher expectations and student achievement (Howard, 2003; López, 2017; Seriki & Brown, 2017). Such positivity is needed because decades of research tell us that teachers consistently attribute student academic or behavioral difficulties to the students themselves or to their families, instead of seeing these challenges as related to their own teaching or other factors (Wang & Hall, 2018).

Let's now put our critical reflection into play—along with our curiosity—and see how we can create the optimum conditions for attention.

Chapter Reflection: Rate Your Ability

This chapter introduced three types of attention. Selective attention is the ability to focus on the task at hand while rejecting other sensory input. Alternating attention is disengaging one of our senses from one activity or stimulus, moving to another stimulus, and then engaging with a new sense or object. Sustained attention is the ability to obtain and maintain an alert state or focus for an extended period of time.

First, rate your ability as 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, with 5 being highest.

How would you rate your ability to select attention in the context of competing demands: 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5? Why did you select that rating?
How would you rate your ability to alternate your attention from one subset of possible sensory inputs to another: 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5? Why did you select that rating?
How would you rate your ability to sustain attention over long periods: 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5? Why did you select that rating?

Now that you have thought about your own attention, the next time you see a student who is on task, consider their attention as an effect, and ask yourself what is causing their attention. Consider this situation in the context of selective, alternating, and sustained attention. What might be interfering with the student's attention?

Learn More: The Complexities of Attention

The multiple types of attention presented in Chapter 1 derive from the information processing model, a dominant theory of cognition for the past 50 years. The concepts of selective, alternating, and sustained attention are based on experimental research in cognitive psychology, on clinical applications, and on an examination of the relationship of the three attention types in creating conditions for attention.

Since the late 1980s, researchers from the fields of cognition and neuropsychology have published descriptions of attention connected to brain structures and brain chemicals; these latter are referred to as brain networks of attention (Posner et al., 2016). These networks combine activating attention, focusing on a stimulus, and controlling attention; they're central to the neurobiology of attention. Leading the way in studying brain networks of attention, Posner acknowledges their incompleteness and expects that future research will "change" and "widen" these conceptualizations (Posner & Rothbart, 2023, p. 5).

Outside the main attention research community, other concepts of attention have emerged and become popular, such as the concept of flow. First described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1979, 2013), flow is an intense focus in a set of optimal conditions. These conditions include having interest, sufficient challenge, and goals to work toward, as well as getting immediate feedback in the task. Attention researchers have related flow to hyperfocus, "a phenomenon that reflects one's complete absorption in a task, to a point where a person appears to completely ignore or 'tune out' everything else" (Ashinoff & Abu-Akel, 2021, p. 1). Other researchers have focused on the concepts of internal and external attention (Chun et al., 2011), with internal attention based on thoughts and memory and external attention based on sensory information.

These are areas to explore in your ongoing learning about attention. In their treatise, "No One Knows What Attention Is," Hommel and colleagues (2019) describe such conceptual confusions as viewing attention as cause and effect, as well as the challenges associated with traditional methods of studying attention. They propose studying attention as an approach that integrates human cognitive, sensory, and behavioral processes.

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