Attention and focus -
Clinical areas : Know if a patient will be able to pay attention to the indications given to them, or if they'll be able to efficiently fit into their environment. Professional areas : Know if a potential employee will be a good driver, quality control manager, office worker, etc.
With the help of a complete neuropsychological assessment , it is possible to easily and effectively evaluate a number of different cognitive skills, like focused attention.
CogniFit's assessment to evaluate focused attention was inspired by the Continuous Performance Test CPT. This test helps to evaluate other behavioral alterations, like impulsiveness, anxiety, and inattention, among others.
In addition to focused attention, the test also measures inhibition and shifting. All cognitive skills, including focused attention, can be trained and improved.
CogniFit's training programs may help. Brain plasticity is the basis of focused attention rehabilitation and other cognitive skills. CogniFit has a battery of exercises designed to help rehabilitate the deficits in focused attention and other cognitive functions. The brain and neural connections can be strengthened by challenging and working them, so by frequently training these skills, the brain structures related to focused attention will become stronger.
This means that when your ears send information to the brain and the brain processes it, the connections will work faster and more efficiently, improving overall your mental focus. CogniFit was created by a team of professionals specialized in the area of neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity, which is how we were able to create a personalized cognitive stimulation program that would be tailored to the needs of each user.
This program starts with an evaluation to assess focused attention and a number of other fundamental cognitive domains, and based on the results, creates a personalized brain training program for each user.
The program automatically collects the data from this initial cognitive assessment, and, with the use of sophisticated algorithms, creates a program that works on improving the user's cognitive weaknesses and training their cognitive strengths. The key to improving sustained attention is adequate and consistent training.
CogniFit has professional assessment and training tools to help both individuals and professionals optimize this function. It only takes 15 minutes a day, two to three times a week. CogniFit's assessments and stimulation programs are available online and can be practiced on most computers and mobile devices.
The program is made up of fun, interactive brain games, and at the end of each training session, the user automatically receives a detailed graph highlighting the user's cognitive progress.
In a clinical setting, the CogniFit results when interpreted by a qualified healthcare provider , may be used as an aid in determining whether further cognitive evaluation is needed.
CogniFit does not offer any medical diagnosis or treatment of any medical disease or condition. CogniFit products may also be used for research purposes for any range of cognitive related assessments. If used for research purposes, all use of the product must be in compliance with appropriate human subjects' procedures as they exist within the researchers' institution and will be the researcher's obligation.
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Registration token is invalid or expired. The product has already been redeemed. The product to be redeemed is not compatible with the account type. Instead, people focus their attention on one thing at a time.
Attention is a fascinating ability, because it enables you to have so much control and the ability to fine-tune your focus to different locations, times, and topics. Consider the page you are reading right now. Although you can see the whole page, you focus on only one line at a time.
Alternatively, you can turn your attention to the past when you were reading the beginning of this page. Scientists recognize two types of attention, which involve different brain processes: voluntary endogenous attention and involuntary exogenous attention.
Voluntary attention happens when you choose what to focus on — like finding a loved one in a crowd. The frontal and parietal cortices of the brain are active when you control your attention or direct it towards a specific object or location.
Involuntary attention occurs when something in the environment like a sudden noise or movement grabs your attention. Involuntary attention is a distraction from your chosen goals and, in fact, researchers often use distractor objects in attention experiments. Distractors can be emotional, like pictures of family, or non-emotional images that stand out from other stimuli, like a red circle surrounded by gray squares.
Brain regions in the right hemisphere , collectively known as the ventral frontoparietal network, form a system that processes new and interesting stimuli that distract you from the task at hand. Research on attention can help us understand visual tasks, learning, child development, and disorders of attention.
Adapted from the 8th edition of Brain Facts by Melissa Galinato. Melissa Galinato. Melissa Galinato recently earned her PhD in Neurosciences from the University of California, San Diego. She works as a freelance writer and editor, specializing in neuroscience and mental health topics.
Bartolomeo, P. Visual neglect. Current opinion in neurology, 20 4 , Carretié, L. Exogenous automatic attention to emotional stimuli: a review. Many Indigenous children in the Americas predominantly learn by observing and pitching in. There are several studies to support that the use of keen attention towards learning is much more common in Indigenous Communities of North and Central America than in a middle-class European-American setting.
This is a direct result of the Learning by Observing and Pitching In model. Keen attention is both a requirement and result of learning by observing and pitching-in. Incorporating the children in the community gives them the opportunity to keenly observe and contribute to activities that were not directed towards them.
It can be seen from different Indigenous communities and cultures, such as the Mayans of San Pedro , that children can simultaneously attend to multiple events.
One example is simultaneous attention which involves uninterrupted attention to several activities occurring at the same time. San Pedro toddlers and caregivers frequently coordinated their activities with other members of a group in multiway engagements rather than in a dyadic fashion.
This learning by observing and pitching-in model requires active levels of attention management. The child is present while caretakers engage in daily activities and responsibilities such as: weaving, farming, and other skills necessary for survival.
In order to learn in this way, keen attention and focus is required. Eventually the child is expected to be able to perform these skills themselves. In the domain of computer vision , efforts have been made to model the mechanism of human attention, especially the bottom-up intentional mechanism [] and its semantic significance in classification of video contents.
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of models to mimic the bottom-up salience mechanism in static images. One way is based on the spatial contrast analysis.
For example, a center—surround mechanism has been used to define salience across scales, inspired by the putative neural mechanism. This model has established itself as the exemplar for salience detection and consistently used for comparison in the literature; [] the other way is based on the frequency domain analysis.
This method was first proposed by Hou et al.. Then, the PQFT method was also introduced. Both SR and PQFT only use the phase information. Hemispatial neglect, also called unilateral neglect , often occurs when people have damage to their right hemisphere. Damage to the left side of the brain the left hemisphere rarely yields significant neglect of the right side of the body or object in the person's local environments.
The effects of spatial neglect, however, may vary and differ depending on what area of the brain was damaged. Damage to different neural substrates can result in different types of neglect.
Attention disorders lateralized and nonlaterized may also contribute to the symptoms and effects. New technology has yielded more information, such that there is a large, distributed network of frontal, parietal, temporal, and subcortical brain areas that have been tied to neglect.
Social attention is one special form of attention that involves the allocation of limited processing resources in a social context. Previous studies on social attention often regard how attention is directed toward socially relevant stimuli such as faces and gaze directions of other individuals.
Attending-to-self and attending-to-others mark the two ends of an otherwise continuum spectrum of social attention. For a given behavioral context, the mechanisms underlying these two polarities might interact and compete with each other in order to determine a saliency map of social attention that guides our behaviors.
According to Daniel Goleman's book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence , there are two types of distracting factors affecting focus — sensory and emotional. A sensory distracting factor would be, for example, while a person is reading this article, they are neglecting the white field surrounding the text.
An emotional distracting factor would be when someone is focused on answering an email, and somebody shouts their name.
It would be almost impossible to neglect the voice speaking it. Attention is immediately directed toward the source. Positive emotions have also been found to affect attention. Induction of happiness has led to increased response times and an increase in inaccurate responses in the face of irrelevant stimuli.
Two possible theories as to why emotions might make one more susceptible to distracting stimuli is that emotions take up too much of one's cognitive resources and make it harder to control your focus of attention.
The other theory is that emotions make it harder to filter out distractions, specifically with positive emotions due to a feeling of security. Another distracting factor to attention processes is insufficient sleep. Sleep deprivation is found to impair cognition, specifically performance in divided attention.
Divided attention is possibly linked with the circadian processes. Inattentional blindness was first introduced in by Arien Mack and Irvic Rock. Their studies show that when people are focused on specific stimuli, they often miss other stimuli that are clearly present.
Though actual blindness is not occurring here, the blindness that happens is due to the perceptual load of what is being attended to.
They presented subjects with a cross, one arm being longer than the other, for 5 trials. On the sixth trial, a white square was added to the top left of the screen.
This would suggest that when a higher focus was attended to the length of the crossed arms, the more likely someone would altogether miss an object that was in plain sight. Change blindness was first tested by Rensink and coworkers in Their studies show that people have difficulty detecting changes from scene to scene due to the intense focus on one thing, or lack of attention overall.
This was tested by Rensink through a presentation of a picture, and then a blank field, and then the same picture but with an item missing. The results showed that the pictures had to be alternated back and forth a good number of times for participants to notice the difference.
This idea is greatly portrayed in films that have continuity errors. Many people do not pick up on differences when in reality, the changes tend to be significant. Psychologist Daniel E. Berlyne credits the first extended treatment of attention to philosopher Nicolas Malebranche in his work "The Search After Truth".
Malebranche writes in "The Search After Truth", "because it often happens that the understanding has only confused and imperfect perceptions of things, it is truly a cause of our errors It is therefore necessary to look for means to keep our perceptions from being confused and imperfect.
And, because, as everyone knows, there is nothing that makes them clearer and more distinct than attentiveness, we must try to find the means to become more attentive than we are".
Philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz introduced the concept of apperception to this philosophical approach to attention. Apperception refers to "the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole.
Leibniz emphasized a reflexive involuntary view of attention known as exogenous orienting. However, there is also endogenous orienting which is voluntary and directed attention. Philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart agreed with Leibniz's view of apperception; however, he expounded on it in by saying that new experiences had to be tied to ones already existing in the mind.
Herbart was also the first person to stress the importance of applying mathematical modeling to the study of psychology. Throughout the philosophical era, various thinkers made significant contributions to the field of attention studies, beginning with research on the extent of attention and how attention is directed.
In the beginning of the 19th century, it was thought that people were not able to attend to more than one stimulus at a time. However, with research contributions by Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet this view was changed.
Hamilton proposed a view of attention that likened its capacity to holding marbles. You can only hold a certain number of marbles at a time before it starts to spill over. His view states that we can attend to more than one stimulus at once.
William Stanley Jevons later expanded this view and stated that we can attend to up to four items at a time. This period of attention research took the focus from conceptual findings to experimental testing. It also involved psychophysical methods that allowed measurement of the relation between physical stimulus properties and the psychological perceptions of them.
This period covers the development of attentional research from the founding of psychology to Wilhelm Wundt introduced the study of attention to the field of psychology. Wundt measured mental processing speed by likening it to differences in stargazing measurements.
Astronomers in this time would measure the time it took for stars to travel. Among these measurements when astronomers recorded the times, there were personal differences in calculation. These different readings resulted in different reports from each astronomer. To correct for this, a personal equation was developed.
Wundt applied this to mental processing speed. Wundt realized that the time it takes to see the stimulus of the star and write down the time was being called an "observation error" but actually was the time it takes to switch voluntarily one's attention from one stimulus to another.
Wundt called his school of psychology voluntarism. It was his belief that psychological processes can only be understood in terms of goals and consequences. Franciscus Donders used mental chronometry to study attention and it was considered a major field of intellectual inquiry by authors such as Sigmund Freud.
Donders and his students conducted the first detailed investigations of the speed of mental processes. Donders measured the time required to identify a stimulus and to select a motor response.
This was the time difference between stimulus discrimination and response initiation. Donders also formalized the subtractive method which states that the time for a particular process can be estimated by adding that process to a task and taking the difference in reaction time between the two tasks.
Hermann von Helmholtz also contributed to the field of attention relating to the extent of attention. Von Helmholtz stated that it is possible to focus on one stimulus and still perceive or ignore others.
An example of this is being able to focus on the letter u in the word house and still perceiving the letters h, o, s, and e. One major debate in this period was whether it was possible to attend to two things at once split attention. Walter Benjamin described this experience as "reception in a state of distraction.
In , William James , in his textbook The Principles of Psychology , remarked:. Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.
It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.
James differentiated between sensorial attention and intellectual attention. Sensorial attention is when attention is directed to objects of sense, stimuli that are physically present.
Intellectual attention is attention directed to ideal or represented objects; stimuli that are not physically present. James also distinguished between immediate or derived attention: attention to the present versus to something not physically present. According to James, attention has five major effects.
Attention works to make us perceive, conceive, distinguish, remember, and shorten reactions time. During this period, research in attention waned and interest in behaviorism flourished, leading some to believe, like Ulric Neisser , that in this period, "There was no research on attention". However, Jersild published very important work on "Mental Set and Shift" in He stated, "The fact of mental set is primary in all conscious activity.
The same stimulus may evoke any one of a large number of responses depending upon the contextual setting in which it is placed". For example, if a list was names of animals versus a list of the same size with names of animals, books, makes and models of cars, and types of fruits, it takes longer to process the second list.
This is task switching. In , Telford discovered the psychological refractory period. The stimulation of neurons is followed by a refractory phase during which neurons are less sensitive to stimulation. In John Ridley Stroop developed the Stroop Task which elicited the Stroop Effect.
Stroop's task showed that irrelevant stimulus information can have a major impact on performance. In this task, subjects were to look at a list of colors. This list of colors had each color typed in a color different from the actual text.
For example, the word Blue would be typed in Orange, Pink in Black, and so on. Example: Blue Purple Red Green Purple Green. Subjects were then instructed to say the name of the ink color and ignore the text.
It took seconds to complete a list of this type compared to 63 seconds to name the colors when presented in the form of solid squares.
In the s, research psychologists renewed their interest in attention when the dominant epistemology shifted from positivism i. Modern research on attention began with the analysis of the " cocktail party problem " by Colin Cherry in At a cocktail party how do people select the conversation that they are listening to and ignore the rest?
This problem is at times called "focused attention", as opposed to "divided attention". Cherry performed a number of experiments which became known as dichotic listening and were extended by Donald Broadbent and others.
After the task, the experimenter would question the subjects about the content of the unattended stream. Broadbent's Filter Model of Attention states that information is held in a pre-attentive temporary store, and only sensory events that have some physical feature in common are selected to pass into the limited capacity processing system.
This implies that the meaning of unattended messages is not identified. Also, a significant amount of time is required to shift the filter from one channel to another. Experiments by Gray and Wedderburn and later Anne Treisman pointed out various problems in Broadbent's early model and eventually led to the Deutsch—Norman model in In this model, no signal is filtered out, but all are processed to the point of activating their stored representations in memory.
The point at which attention becomes "selective" is when one of the memory representations is selected for further processing. At any time, only one can be selected, resulting in the attentional bottleneck.
This debate became known as the early-selection vs. late-selection models. In the early selection models first proposed by Donald Broadbent , attention shuts down in Broadbent's model or attenuates in Treisman's refinement processing in the unattended ear before the mind can analyze its semantic content.
In the late selection models first proposed by J. Anthony Deutsch and Diana Deutsch , the content in both ears is analyzed semantically, but the words in the unattended ear cannot access consciousness.
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Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote. Psychological process of selectively perceiving and prioritising discrete aspects of information.
This article is about the psychological concept of attention. For other uses, see Attention disambiguation. See also: Selective auditory attention. See also: Human multitasking and Distracted driving.
Main article: Hemispatial neglect. Alertness Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder Attention restoration theory Attention seeking Attention span Attention theft Attentional control Attentional shift Binding problem Cognitive inhibition Consciousness Crossmodal attention Flow psychology Focusing psychotherapy Informal learning Joint attention Immanuel Kant Meditation Mindfulness Motivation Nonverbal communication Observational Learning Ovsiankina effect Perceptual learning The role of attention Philosophy Salience also called saliency Self Split attention effect Vigilance Visual search Visual spatial attention Visual temporal attention Working memory.
Encyclopædia Britannica. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications 6th ed. Worth Publishers. ISBN Understanding vision: theory, models, and data. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Cognitive Psychology: connecting mind, research, and everyday experience.
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New research shows little risk of infection from prostate biopsies. Quality natural weight management Attention and focus work is linked focsu high blood Attentoin. Icy fingers and toes: Fat blocker diet circulation or Raynaud's phenomenon? Everyone's attention can drift at times, like when you lose your concentration for a moment while doing routine tasks. Many people shrug off these lapses in focus as "senior moments," but they might be related to a vulnerable brain process called executive function. Joel Salinas, a neurologist with Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.
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