How many types of attention are there? Part 1 | Neurons

I myself like to call it attentive inattention. The concept was pioneered by Ulric Neisser, the father of cognitive psychology. Neisser noticed how he could look out a window at twilight and either see the external world or focus on the reflection of the room in the glass. But he couldn’t actively pay attention to both. Twilight or reflection had t

We therefore need to distinguish between two types of attention. Conscious attention is when you are in some way aware of where your attention is being directed and unconscious attention is when you are unaware of what you are attending to.

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.

Traditionally, cognitive psychologists have made a distinction among different areas of study: memory, attention, categorization, language acquisition and use, decision-making, and one or two other topics.

We use the word attention to describe top-down processes.

Selective attention is the cognitive process in which the brain attends to a small number of sensory inputs while filtering out what it deems unnecessary distractions.

The condition in which the mind “stands back” to observe its own state and activities is called metacognitive introspective awareness. 13 Attention, on the other hand, can’t observe activities of the mind because its movements and abstracting of information from awareness are activities of the mind. In other words, we can’t attend to attention. Whe

When it comes to focused attention, we focus on one thing only, something we can sustain for only a few seconds. The maximum duration of focused attention seems not to have changed over time (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013, 91). Focused attention is different from “sustained attention,” which we need to stay focused on one task for a longer period and is