How many types of attention are there? Part 1 | Neurons
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How many types of attention are there? Part 1 | Neurons
The conventional neuropsychological literature distinguishes five types of attention: vigilance, sustained attention, alertness, focussed attention and divided attention.
Iain McGilchrist • The Master and His Emissary
Psychologists now refer to two types of attention: spotlight and floodlight. When we are focused on a single task, we use our spotlight brain to centre all of our efforts on its completion. But when we split our concentration between several tasks, we employ a floodlight approach, where we work on more than one thing at a time.
Katherine Ormerod • Why Social Media is Ruining Your Life
Using brain scanning and behavioural experiments, researchers at the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neurosciences at Vanderbilt University have identified a unified attentional bottleneck in the human brain, which impacts both perception and action. Simply put, we’re bad at dividing our attention between different tasks.
Ness Labs • Cognitive bottlenecks: the inherent limits of the thinking mind
To recap, there are four components in the human attentional system: the mind-wandering mode, the central executive mode, the attentional filter, and the attentional switch, which directs neural and metabolic resources among the mind-wandering, stay-on-task, or vigilance modes.
Daniel J. Levitin • The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
Attention and focus. Attention can be diffuse and global, like a floodlight, or tight and focused, like a spotlight. The ability to concentrate attention and keep it focused is necessary for accomplishing just about anything in life. More complex tasks require a greater capacity for sustained focus and attention, whereas conditions like ADD and ADH
... See moreBrant Cortright • The Neurogenesis Diet and Lifestyle: Upgrade Your Brain, Upgrade Your Life
Usually, when we think about attention, we only think about focused attention – something that requires willpower to sustain. This is not too surprising, because this is what most psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists used to have in mind when they talked about attention (Bruya 2010, 5). Today, research differentiates between multiple for
... See moreSönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking
Alerting, which indicates when to attend, and adapts our level of vigilance. Orienting, which signals what to attend to, and amplifies any object of interest. Executive attention, which decides how to process the attended information, selects the processes that are relevant to a given task, and controls their execution.
Stanislas Dehaene • How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now
From a neurobiological perspective, these triggers drive attention in one of three ways.18 Either they push dopamine and/or norepinephrine, two of the brain’s main focusing chemicals, into our system, or they lower cognitive load, which is the psychological weight of all the stuff we’re thinking about at any one time. By lowering cognitive load, we
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