How do we pay attention?
Imagine the scenario: you are at a concert with your friend. The venue is full of people, all chatting. The band is warming up on the stage. The place is full of noise with so much stimuli around you and yet: you can still focus on the conversation you are having with your friend. This is what psychologists call the “cocktail party effect”. The “cocktail party effect” is this amazing human ability to focus on a single speaker in almost any environment, and tune out the rest of the noise. But what exactly is attention? Read on to find out!
What is attention?
We continuously pull on our attention skills every day in order to complete tasks such as driving to work, talking to coworkers, or following the latest TV series. Scientifically speaking, attention refers to the ability to orient to, to shift between, and maintain focus on events, objects, or tasks in our environment. The emergence of attention skills is really important for our overall development. Attention provides a foundation for learning a range of other skills including academic achievement, learning languages, and making friends.
There are different types of attention?
Absolutely! The “cocktail party effect” mentioned above - our ability to focus on a single person or conversation in a room full of noise - is an example of selective attention. Selective attention is required when we are faced with cluttered environments such as a noisy room. Selective attention allows our brains to decide what will be represented and what will not. It can be conscious (when we choose to focus on what’s on the TV instead of focusing on what's on the coffee table) or unconscious (if we look out at a blue sea with a single red boat on it, the boat will receive attention initially). Below is a famous example of how we pay selective attention to scenes:
Another type of attention is sustained attention. Sustained attention is the ability to maintain focus on a stimulus for a long period of time. It involves three stages of attention getting, attention holding, and attention releasing. For example, reading this blog post (and hopefully not getting distracted by something else!) is an example of sustained attention.
Credit: Medium.com
So how is our brain involved?
Neuroscientific research shows that the electrical activity of the brain’s cortex changes when we focus our attention on something. Neurons stop signalling in sync with one another and start firing out of sync. This allows individual neurons to respond to what’s happening around us in different ways. We can focus on the car speeding towards us before we cross the road, or we can listen to our friend in the crowded concert venue.
Researchers from the University of Queensland led by Professor Stephen Williams highlighted how a system called ‘the cholinergic system’ could act like a “master switch” for our attention. The cholinergic system is a cluster of neurons that are involved in releasing a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine throughout our body (remember we talked about neurotransmitters in our last blog post!).
An area of our brain that is particularly important for attention control is our prefrontal cortex which is located within our frontal lobe. A study from the National Institute of Mental Health in the US found that when monkeys had damaged their prefrontal cortex, they were less able to pay attention to a task where they had to determine whether an object was vertical or not! [1]. In humans, brain imaging studies have allowed us to examine what happens to our prefrontal cortex during attention tasks. One way in which this has been studied is by comparing the brains of individuals who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) - a developmental disorder that impacts attention control - to the brains of individuals without ADHD. Research shows that the prefrontal cortex is less active during attention tasks in both adults and children with ADHD [2].
Are there ways that we can improve our attention?
Possibly! Studies with both children and adults have shown that training our attention is possible. For example, one study found that adults who played a lot of non-violent video games were better at remembering visual information than adults who didn’t play video games. The same result was found when participants were randomly selected to spend 10 hours training to play video games or not [3]!
A recent study with 47 children tested whether a mindfulness intervention could improve attention. They found that participating in this intervention improved the children’s ability to regulate their own attention4.Of course, there are plenty of other things we can do in our daily lives to help improve our attention - without playing 10 hours of video games! Research has shown that getting a good night’s sleep [5] and physical exercise [6] can help to increase our attention abilities.
Why not give it a go yourself? Do you find that a better night’s sleep or a workout helps your concentration? Let us know in the comments below or on our Facebook and Twitter pages! Come back next time when Lisa will be talking about all things sleep!
Resources
Rossi, A. F., Pessoa, L., Desimone, R., & Ungerleider, L. G. (2009). The prefrontal cortex and the executive control of attention. Experimental brain research, 192(3), 489–497. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-008-1642-z
Cortese, S., Kelly, C., Chabernaud, C., Proal, E., Di Martino, A., Milham, M. P., & Castellanos, F. X. (2012). Toward systems neuroscience of ADHD: a meta-analysis of 55 fMRI studies. The American journal of psychiatry, 169(10), 1038–1055. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.11101521
Tang, Y., Posner, M. I. (2009). Attention training and attention state training, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 13, Issue 5, 222-227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2009.01.009.
Felver, J. C., Tipsord, J. M., Morris, M. J., Racer, K. H., & Dishion, T. J. (2017). The Effects of Mindfulness-Based Intervention on Children’s Attention Regulation. Journal of Attention Disorders, 21(10), 872–881. https://doi.org/10.1177/1087054714548032
Hudson, A.N., Van Dongen, H.P.A. & Honn, K.A. (2020) Sleep deprivation, vigilant attention, and brain function: a review. Neuropsychopharmacol. 45, 21–30. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-019-0432-6
Pontifex, M. B., Saliba, B. J., Raine, L. B., Picchietti, D. L., & Hillman, C. H. (2013). Exercise improves behavioral, neurocognitive, and scholastic performance in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The Journal of pediatrics, 162(3), 543–551. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2012.08.036
Some other reading:
Amso, D., & Scerif, G. (2015). The attentive brain: insights from developmental cognitive neuroscience. Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 16(10), 606–619. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn4025
