There are two types of attention: focused and divided. Focused attention is concentrating on one thing, while divided attention is multitasking. People filter out distractions to focus on what they need to do. A hierarchical model outlines five attention tasks of increasing difficulty. Paying attention is important for success, and those with attention problems may have a developmental malfunction in their brain.
There are two basic types of attention: focused attention and divided attention. Focused attention is the state of concentrating on one stimulus to the exclusion of all others. The purpose of focused attention is to actively focus on one thing without being distracted by other stimuli. This state can be physically and mentally tiring. Most behaviors are a combination of focused attention and divided attention.
Daily life is full of distractions and people are bombarded with all kinds of stimuli during a typical day. If a person noticed all these stimuli, he would soon be overworked and, most likely, completely unable to complete any task. For this reason, people exercise their focused, or selective, attention and filter out most information while retaining only that small fraction they wish to focus on.
The human mind sorts through that tiny fraction in two ways. The first is a bottom-up approach in which attention is driven by the stimulus. This means that there are certain aspects of a stimulus that attract a person’s attention, whether they want to or not. The second way is called ‘top-down’ processing which is goal-driven; individuals control which stimuli receive attention. This is also referred to as executive attention.
A hierarchical model is based on the recovery of attention processes of patients with brain damage after coma. It outlines five different attention tasks of increasing difficulty that patients could handle as their recovery process progresses. The first, and therefore the simplest for these patients, was focused attention which was defined as the discrete response to specific sensory stimuli. Then came sustained attention, or alertness, selective attention, alternating attention, and finally divided attention. Divided attention was considered the most difficult as it relates to the ability to respond to multi-tasking and this could only be done by patients with brain damage nearing full recovery.
Paying attention is considered one of the keys to success, as is focusing your mind on a task and filtering out all other distractions. People with attention problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are unable to filter out distractions and focus on one thing. Researchers at University College London have found that those who are easily distracted and demonstrate a lack of focused attention have larger volumes of gray matter in certain parts of the brain. They concluded with the hypothesis that this could demonstrate a subtle developmental malfunction in a brain that hasn’t matured as it should.
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