There are different types of attention that contribute to academic and occupational success. They are as follows.

Sustained Attention – This attention type enables a student to stay on a task for a long period of time. The attention of the student in this case does not move away from the task.

Selective Attention – This attention type enables a student to stay on task even when a distraction is present.

Divided Attention – This attention type allows a student to handle two or more tasks at one time. It lets the student pay attention to different tasks even as he or her multi-tasks.

In order to identify a particular attention type from among the three different types of attention, it is suggested that you watch for a student’s inability to:

stay on a task for long periods of time,

ignore distractions, or

multi-task.

en it comes to studying or learning, one of the most important ingredients is focus and attention. Attention is the process or act of concentrating on one or more environmental factors that your five senses experience. In case of learning, you’ll need to focus or concentrate on the subject matter being thought. But some individuals particularly those suffering from ADHD might have a concern particularly on keeping their focus and attention. This makes the learning process a challenge for them. To learn how to adapt, knowing the four kinds of attention related to cognition is a must. These include: sustained attention, alternating attention, divided attention, and selective attention.

Sustained Attention

It’s pretty simple to catch anyone’s attention but it is certainly a challenge to sustain or keep it for any considerable amount of time. Sustained attention is the ability to keep that focus or concentration for long periods of time even if the individual is exposed to the repetitive action or activity. This is the kind of attention that is usually used for majority of the learning and working activities like listening to a teacher lecture the whole hour, read books and notes the whole night to review, in answering test or exercise questions, completing an extensive project, or perhaps, regularly working on a repetitive task. This kind of attention should be very beneficial but it is the kind that is oftentimes very hard to acquire or achieve.

Selective Attention

When faced with a number of environmental factors or stimuli, the human brain naturally responds by selecting a particular aspect or factor to focus on. This is known as selective attention. Selective

attention is the ability to select from the many factors or stimuli and focus to only one that you prefer or your brain selects. This is not really a special and hard to achieve kind of attention. Almost all people use this cognitive ability almost all the time. Every day, people are usually exposed to a number of environmental factors at home, at the school, at the office, etc but their brains respond by focusing only to the particular factors that matter most or those that people choose to focus on. By better understanding it however, the person is better able to select the appropriate stimuli to devote his or her attention to.

Alternating Attention

The next kind of attention is the alternating type. As its name suggests, it’s the ability to switch or immediately transfer your focus or concentration from one activity to another. The brain also instantly adapts even if the succeeding activity has a different level of knowledge or comprehension required. Similar to selective attention, alternating attention is also an ability that is used almost all the time. Every day, you need to make sudden changes on your activity or action which also requires your attention to shift.

Divided Attention

The last kind of attention related to cognition is an interesting one, divided attention. Divided attention is the ability of an individual to focus or concentrate on two or more environmental factors, stimuli, or activities simultaneously. In its simplest form of explanation, experts call it the ability to multi-task. Multi-tasking is considered a desirable talent for those who are gifted with this ability. But, this means that it will be very difficult for other people to acquire this skill. Divided attention or the ability to multi-task can be learned through practice or gaining expertise in a certain kind of activity.

Sources

Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD.

Barkley, Russell A., Psychological Bulletin, Vol 121(1), Jan 1997, 65-94. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.121.1.65

The different theories of attention are the capacity theory, the mental bottleneck theory, and a few related theories of selective attention. Each of these theories uses models based on the ideas of the mental health researchers who first contributed to them. Psychologists who study attention theory attempt to determine the exact cognitive process of how people focus their attention on external stimuli. They also form and refine theories of attention concerning why certain people have longer versus shorter attention spans. The psychology of attention uses various relevant theories to find effective treatment options for people with noticeable attention problems.

Capacity theories of attention explain that people have a limited amount of attention to devote to any one thing at any given moment. A lot of competing information from different sources can cause their attention to reach its capacity rather quickly. When people's attention capacity hits its maximum limit, they generally experience a diminished ability to pay attention to any of the external information. Some psychologists who study these types of attention theories use them to point out the actual ineffectiveness of multitasking despite its prevalence in modern life. Multitasking and the frequent use of technology are additional contributing factors to some theories about attention.

bottleneck attention theory dictates that everyone has a natural mental filter that will only allow certain amounts of information through at a time. This filter sorts what people first perceive as important based on an impression that lasts only a fraction of a second. Other stimuli that the brain designates irrelevant either does not pass through the filter or passes through only in pieces. Many psychologists study bottleneck theories of attention to determine why some people filter out certain kinds of information while others do not. This examination of the bottleneck attention theory often forms a basis for selective attention theories.

Theories about selective attention draw connections between peoples' varying attention levels and other related factors. Existing biases, interests, and past experiences can all influence how closely different people pay attention to a given topic. Psychologists can also draw conclusions about different people's innate abilities to give a subject their direct attention. Some theories of attention frequently help researchers determine the root causes of conditions such as attention deficit disorder. Many of these attention problems have underlying genetic causes, although some specific environmental factors can usually worsen or strengthen the ability to focus and concentrate.

LIMITED CAPACITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR PROCESSING INFORMATION

A.) Selectivity: we choose from many inputs which to attend to--if there are too many things to attend to something suffers.

B.) Mental Effort or "Concentration": energy or effort expended in processing a task.

Influenced by:

1. General arousal

2. Automatic vs Deliberate processing

3. Single vs Multiple Resource Theory: two tasks may tap different resource pools

THEORIES OF ATTENTION

There are two major categories of theories: filter theories and capacity theories.

A.) Placement of an attention filter--need to select out which incoming stimuli are attended to and which are ignored.

1.) Early Selection Theory: Selective filter prior to abstract STM (prior to Central Processing Unit, CPU) e.g., Broadbent, 1957; Triesman, 1960. Target stimuli are processed more fully because there is perceptual suppression of nontarget stimuli.

Multiple inputs are registered and held briefly but only one message is analyzed perceptually--perceptual analysis requires attention, which is limited to one input at a time.

ATTENTION IS A BOTTLENECK (the point at which information overload is reached) THAT LIMITS PERCEPTION.

a.) Broadbent (1957): subjects attend to only one ear--they perform well, but remember little about what they heard in the other ear.

Selective filter occurs prior to abstract STM. Subjects can tell sensory characteristics from the unattended ear: male/female voice; music/ noise/speech--no semantic processing

A second example is the split span experiment: (why not use 7?)

Right ear hears: 149

Left ear hears: 325

Numbers are presented simultaneously to both ears, rapidly. Subjects can attend well to one ear at a time and must hold the information from the other ear in a buffer memory.

If subjects are asked to recall the digits ear by ear they will do well, but if asked to recall the digits by pairs they do poorly.

This is the ‘funnel’ model in which movement of a flap (1) uses energy; and (2) takes time--so with pair by pair retrieval the buffer decays because the flap moves more times than with ear by ear retrieval.

Broadbent's theory of strict serial processing explains apparent parallel processing (watching TV and eating popcorn at the same time) as time-sharing or multiplexing--two or more tasks are done by simply switching attention back and forth between them.

Norman, 1969: Interrupted subjects periodically during a shadowing task.

Found subjects were able to recall the last 1-2 words from the unattended ear.

Therefore all the information was processed to some extent--

Filter had to occur after abstract STM.

Gray & Wedderburn (1960) found that if you give the following:

Left Ear: then he said what 4 hell

Right Ear: 3 2 5 1 the 9

subjects jump back and forth between ears. Thus, it seems that messages from both ears get into sensory memory, and subjects choose certain features, including semantic, for selecting what to attend to in sensory memory.

This suggests the information in the unattended ear is processed somewhere and leads to:

2.) Late Selection Theory: selective filter after abstract STM; e.g., Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963; Norman, 1969.

The differential processing accorded to target and nontarget stimuli is thought to be nonperceptual in nature.

According to this model all perceptual information enters the system, but only that which is selected by the special attention mechanism reaches higher processing centers.

The basic difference between early and late selection theories lies in their view of the processing stage at which unimportant aspects of information or stimuli are screened out.

Early-selection theories propose that certain stimuli are never processed due to perceptual suppression of nontarget stimuli.

Late-selection theories propose that the unimportant information enters the system but simply is not chosen for further processing.

Triesman, 1969: suggested the filter can occur at several places.

It is selective across a whole continuum of input characteristics, and its tuning at any moment is determined by the character of the information that has most recently entered consciousness.

The filter never completely blocks any incoming stimulation; it simply attenuates (lessens in intensity) it, making is more or less perceptible.

Incoming information may set the filter.

Sometimes called a ‘leaky’ filter model.

B.) Capacity Allocation Theories - There is thought to be a pool of resources which can be brought to bear and a central allocation mechanism which dumps resources in one direction.

Example: walking and talking: if you become interested in the conversation walking slows.

1.) Single-Resource Theory - one large single pool of processing capacity (e.g., Kahneman, 1973).

2.) Multiple-Resource Theory - different pools for different tasks (e.g., Navon & Gopher, 1979)--i.e., hemispheres and dual tasks.

C.) Kahneman’s model: suggested real world tasks require concurrent operation of perceptual and cognitive processes.

Core Assumption: mental processes compete for a single, limited pool of resources, or capacity.

He assumes there is also an allocation policy which is affected by enduring dispositions (individual differences in selection), momentary intentions (temporally-tied selection), and evaluation of demands on capacity (subjective decision) and this is all modulated by arousal.

D.) Multimode Theory: Johnston & Heinz (1978)

Suggested both filter and capacity models may contribute to actual attention processes.

We adapt to mode of attention best suited to current task demands.

Paradigm: dual task methodology with 2 groups

Group One: shadow one ear based on pitch of voice (male/female)--early filter task.

Group Two: shadow words based on category membership--late filter task.

Concurrently press a button whenever a light comes on.

Predictions:

Shadowing based on pitch takes less effort and dual task will show relatively fast RTs.

Shadowing based on semantic process takes more effort and dual task will show relatively slower RTs.

Outcome:

Supported predictions:

Conclusions:

Attention requires capacity.

Capacity requirements increase from early to late filter placement.

AUTOMATIC VS CONTROLLED (DELIBERATE) PROCESSING

A.) Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977 investigated the ways which subjects scan a visual display.

Two conditions: same-category, wherein letters were scanned for on a field of letters, and different-category, wherein a number was scanned for on a field of letters.

The same category condition was more difficult for subjects--they required more time and made more errors.

S & S argued that before coming into the lab subjects were well practiced at detecting a number among letters so that this process was automatic.

In contrast, when subjects had to identify a letter among letters deliberate processing was needed. Subjects had to attend to each letter in each frame.

In the different category condition all items could be checked simultaneously because the detection process was automatic.

In a second experiment they used the same pool of letters as targets (e.g., b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l) and the same pool of letters as distractors (q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z).

With practice subjects were able to learn to learn this discrimination to the point where their performance became automatic. Attention no longer needed to be devoted to scanning each individual letter sequentially.

Similarly, LaBerge & Samuels (1974) taught subjects to discriminate real letters and artificial letters. Across time, subjects were able to discriminate mirror-image from identical letters.

B.) Posner & Snyder (1975) concluded that automatic processes:

Occur without intention.

Require little attention.

Are well-practiced.

Complete themselves without conscious control.

Lower level processes are more likely to become automatic than are later, more cognitive processes.

Do not interfere with one another.

C.) Hasher & Zacks (1979, 1984) provided evidence we automatically encode certain events.

In a series of studies across several age groups they showed that information for frequency of occurrence of an event, for its spatial features, and for temporal information is all automatically encoded along with the target information.

Predicted effects for automatic and effortful processing

Automatic Processing Effortful Processing

Intentional versus incidental learning:

No difference Intentional Better

Effect of instructions and practice:

No effects Both improve performance

Task interference:

No interference Interference

Depression or high arousal:

No effects Decreased performance

Developmental trends:

None Decreased performance

in young children or elderly

PROCESS SPECIFIC APPROACH: PRACTICAL APPLICATION

Current models of attention fail to adequately address the clinical phenomena of attention deficits, or their remediation.

The process specific approach views attention as the capacity to focus on particular stimuli over time and to flexibly manipulate the information.

Attention is conceptualized as a multi-dimensional cognitive capacity fundamental to information processing.

Deficits in memory and learning are often a consequence of impaired attentional processing.

Within this model there are four levels or components of attention. These are:

A. Sustained Attention - Vigilance

The ability to maintain a consistent behavioral response during continuous or repetitive activity.

B. Selective Attention - Focused

The ability to maintain a cognitive set which requires activation and inhibition of responses dependent upon discrimination of stimuli--includes the ability to screen out extraneous visual or auditory information.

C. Alternating Attention - Switching

The capacity for mental flexibility which allows for moving between tasks having different cognitive requirements.

D. Divided Attention

The ability to simultaneously respond to multiple tasks.

Attention and pattern of interference

he concept of attention as central to human performance extends back to the start of experimental psychology, yet even a few years ago, it would not have been possible to outline in even a preliminary form a functional anatomy of the human attentional system. New developments in neuroscience have opened the study of higher cognition to physiological analysis, and have revealed a system of anatomical areas that appear to be basic to the selection of information for focal (conscious) processing. The importance of attention is its unique role in connecting the mental level of description of processes used in cognitive science with the anatomical level common in neuroscience. Sperry describes the central role that mental concepts play in understanding brain function. As is the case for sensory and motor systems of the brain, our knowledge of the anatomy of attention is incomplete. Nevertheless, we can now begin to identify some principles of organization that allow attention to function as a unified system for the control of mental processing. Although many of our points are still speculative and controversial, we believe they constitute a basis for more detailed studies of attention from a cognitive-neuroscience viewpoint. Perhaps even more important for furthering future studies, multiple methods of mental chronometry, brain lesions, electrophysiology, and several types of neuro-imaging have converged on common findings.